Little Big Man: A Novel

CHAPTER 1 A Terrible Mistake

I AM A WHITE MAN and never forgot it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.

My Pa had been a minister of the gospel in Evansville, Indiana. He didn’t have a regular church, but managed to talk some saloonkeeper into letting him use his place of a Sunday morning for services. This saloon was down by the riverfront and the kind of people would come in there was Ohio River boatmen, Hoosier fourflushers on their way to New Orleans, pickpockets, bullyboys, whores, and suchlike, my Pa’s favorite type of congregation owing to the possibilities it afforded for the improvement of a number of mean skunks.

The first time he come into the saloon and started to preach, that bunch was fixing to lynch him, but he climbed on top of the bar and started to yell and in a minute or two they all shut up and listened. My Pa could handle with his voice any white man that ever lived, though he was only of the middle height and skinny as a pick handle. What he’d do, you see, was to make a person feel guilty of something they never thought of. Distraction was his game. He’d stare with his blazing eyes at some big, rough devil off the boats and shout: How long’s it been you ain’t seen your old Ma? Like as not that fellow would scrape his feet and honk his nose in his sleeve, and when my brothers and sisters carried around cleaned-out spittoons for the collection, remember us kindly for our pains.

Pa split the collection with the saloonkeeper, which was part of the reason he was let to use the place. The other part was that the bar stayed open throughout the service. My Pa wasn’t no Puritan. He’d take a shot or three himself right while he was preaching, and was never known to say a word against the drink, or women, or cards, or any of the pleasures. Every kind of sport has been invented by the Lord and therefore can’t be bad in itself, he would say. It’s only bad when the pursuit of it makes a man into a mean skunk who will cuss and spit and chew and never wash his face. These were the only specific sins I ever heard my Pa mention. He never minded a cigar, but was dead set against chewing tobacco, foul language, and dirt on a person. So long as a man was clean, my Pa didn’t care whether he drank himself to death, gambled away every cent so that his kids starved, or got sick from frequenting low women.

I never suspected it at that time, being just a young boy, but I realize now that my Pa was a lunatic. Whenever he wasn’t raving he would fall into the dumps and barely answer when he was spoke to, and at his meals he was single-minded as an animal in filling his belly. Before he got religion he was a barber, and even afterward he cut the hair of us kids, and I tell you if the spirit come over him at such a time it was indeed a scaring experience: he would holler and jump and like as not take a piece of your neck flesh with his scissor just as soon as he would hair.

My Pa was making out right well in that saloon—although it is true there was a movement afoot among the regular preachers to run him out of town because he was stealing their congregations aside from them middle-aged women who prefer the ordinary kind of Christianity that forbids everything—when he suddenly decided he ought to go to Utah and become a Mormon. Among other things he liked the Mormon idea that a man is entitled to a number of wives. The point is that other than cussing, chewing, etc., my Pa was all for freedom of every type. He wasn’t interested himself in having an additional wife, but liked the principle. That’s why my Ma didn’t mind. She was a tiny little woman with a round, innocent face faintly freckled, and when Pa got too excited on a day when he wasn’t going to preach and work off his steam, she would make him undress and sit in a barrel-half and would scrub his back with a brush, which calmed him down after about fifteen minutes.

Pa took us all to Independence, Missouri, where he bought a wagon and team of ox, and we set out on the California Trail. That was near as I can figure the spring of 1852, but we still run into a number of poor devils going out on the arse-end of the gold rush that started in ’48. Before long we had accumulated a train of seven wagon and two horse, and the others had elected Pa as leader, though he didn’t know no more about crossing the plains than I do about the lingo of the heathen Chinese who in later years was to work sixteen hours a day building the Central Pacific Railroad. But given to shouting the way he was, I think they figured since they couldn’t shut him up, might as well make him boss. Then too, every night stop he would preach around the fire, and they all required that, because like everybody who gives up everything for the sake of one big idea, they periodically lost all of their hopes. I ought to give a sample of my Pa’s preaching, since if we don’t hear from him soon we’ll never get another chance, but it wouldn’t mean much a hundred year away and in a Morris chair or wherever the reader is sitting, when it was originally delivered by evening on the open prairie next a sweetish-smelling fire of dried buffalo dung. It might seem just crazy, without showing any of the real inspiration in it, which was a matter of sound rather than sense, I think, though that may be only because I was a kid at the time. The ironical thing is that my Pa was somewhat like an Indian.

Indians. Now and again, crossing the Nebraska Territory, following the muddy Platte, we would encounter small bands of Pawnee. Indians was Indians to me and of course as a kid I approved of them generally because they didn’t seem to have a purpose. The ones we saw would always appear coming over the next divide when the train was a quarter mile away, and would mope along on their ponies as if they were going right on past and then suddenly turn when they got alongside and come over to beg food. What they wanted was coffee and would try to get you to stop and brew them a pot, rather than hand out a piece of bacon rind or lump of sugar while rolling. I believe what they preferred even better than the coffee, though, was to bring our progress to a halt. Nothing drives an Indian crazy like regular, monotonous movement. That’s why they not only never invented the wheel, but never even took it up after the white man brought it, as long as they stayed wild, though they were quick enough to grab the horse and the gun and steel knife.

But they really did favor coffee, too, and would sit on their blankets, nodding and saying How, how after every sip, and then they chewed the biscuit my Ma would also hand, out, and said How, how after every swallow of that as well.

Pa, as you might expect, was much taken with Indians because they did what they pleased, and he always tried to involve them in a philosophical discussion, which was hopeless on account of they didn’t know any English and he didn’t even know sign language. And it is a pity, for as I found out in time to come, there is no one who loves to spout hot air like a redskin.

When the Pawnee were finished they would get up, pick their teeth with their fingers, say How, how a couple of times more, climb on their ponies and ride off, with never a word of thanks; but some of them might shake hands, a practice they were just learning from the white man, and as anything an Indian takes up becomes a mania with him, those that did would shake with every individual in the train, man, woman, and child and baby in the cradle; I was only surprised they didn’t grab an ox by the right forefoot.

They never said thanks because it wasn’t in their etiquette at that time, and they had already shown their courtesy with them incessant how-how’s, which is to say, good, good. You can look the world over without finding anyone more mannerly than an Indian. The point of these visits had somewhat to do with manners, because these fellows were not beggars in the white sense, the kind of degenerates I seen in big cities who had no other means of support. In the Indian code, if you see a stranger you either eat with him or fight him, but more often you eat with him, fighting being too important an enterprise to waste on somebody you hardly know. We all could have run into one of their camps, and they would have had to feed us.

This entertaining kept getting bigger every day, because I figure one Pawnee would tell another, You ought to go over to that wagon train and get some biscuit and coffee, and as we traveled with them ox only about two miles an hour when moving, and stopping to brew coffee slowed it down even more, we was in range of the tribe for several weeks. Larger and larger bands would show up, including women and even infants in seats fixed up on lodgepoles trailing behind the horses, the so-called travois. So by the time we reached Cheyenne country, in the southeastern corner of what is now the state of Wyoming, and it started all over again with a new tribe, everybody in the wagons had used up their coffee, making that the principal supply we intended to lay in on the stop at Fort Laramie at the junction of the Laramie and North Platte rivers.

At Laramie, though, they had run out of the beans and did not expect another shipment for a week, that being some years before the railroad. Oddly enough my Pa would have been willing to wait, but the others were hot to get on out to California, being they was already three years behind time.

Jonas Troy was an ex-railway clerk who had come out from Ohio. I remember him as wearing a little fringe of beard and having a skinny wife and one kid, a boy about a year older than me, a very nasty child who tended to kick and bite when we fell out at play and then when you got him back would cry.

Indins, said Mr. Troy, like whiskey even more than coffee, so I heard. Besides, it’s easier to serve. You don’t have to stop rolling, just tip the jug.

Troy and my Pa at this minute were standing in front of the stores at Laramie that were built into the inside of the stockade wall. Must have been a dozen people passed them during the time they arrived at that decision who could have told them otherwise and saved their lives—trappers, scouts, soldiers, even Indians themselves—but of course they never thought of asking: Troy because he believed in anything thought up by himself and confirmed by my Pa, and Pa because on the basis of his encounters with the Pawnee he figured he knew an Indian to the core.

Sure, said Pa. I can tell you, Brother Troy, that the nature of the fluid don’t concern the redman. It is the act of libation itself. Remember it is written in the Book of Mormon that the Indin comprises the lost tribes of Israel. That accounts for my difficulty in speech with them noble specimens along the Platte, knowing not a word of Hebrew though I intend to give it study when we reach Salt Lake. But the Lord has enabled me in His inscrutable wisdom to communicate directly, heart to heart, with our red brothers and what I hear is love and justice commingled.

So they bought a number of full jugs from the traders and shortly thereafter we pulled away from Laramie without any coffee. I can still recall seeing the fields on the west side of the fort covered with junk throwed away by others who had gone before: oak tables and chairs, bookcases with glass doors, a sofa covered in red plush.… It’s a wonder what some people will want to take across thousands of mile of buffalo grass, desert, river, and mountain. There was even a lot of books laying there, all swoll up from the weather and bust open, and my Pa took time to run through some of them in hopes of finding the Book of Mormon he talked about but actually had not ever seen a copy of, having got all his information on the Latter-day Saints from some traveling tinker who come in the saloon in Evansville and was drunk at that. As a matter of fact, now that I look back on it, I don’t think my Pa knew how to read, and such parts of the Gospel as he could quote he had heard from other preachers when he was still a barber.

A day or so from the fort, on the south side of the North Platte, still in rolling grass country though up ahead the bluffs began and beyond them the Laramie Mountains showed peaks of snow, and the date I reckon to have been in early June, we had our chance to give Troy’s theory a workout. For here, from the direction of the river, their ponies’ feet still dripping water, come a band of about two dozen Cheyenne braves. The Cheyenne is a handsome folk, often tall and straight-limbed, and like all great warriors the men tend to be vain. As courtesy would have it when upon a visit, these fellows were all decked out in bead necklaces and breastplates of joined bones, and their hair was braided with that ribbon the traders carry. Most of them wore a single eagle feather, and one a plug hat of which the crown was cut out so his head could breathe.

As usual, they had appeared of a sudden over a bluff when the train was at the distance of about a quarter mile. You will seldom encounter a party of Indians moving along a flat space; they go along level ground, of course, but the usual white man won’t catch them at it. Even after I lived among redskins for some years I couldn’t explain how they know when other people are in the neighborhood. Oh, they drive a knife blade into the earth and listen at the haft, but you can’t generally hear your prey unless it’s galloping. Or they might pile up a little cairn of stones at the top of a divide, and with that as cover for their head, spy around it down the valley. But the plains is one swell after another, like ocean waves frozen in position, and since all you can see from one rise is the intervening stretch to the top of the next, you will miss whatever is beyond it. And the Indians don’t pick every divide; just certain ones; yet when they do look, they generally see something.

Troy’s idea about serving the whiskey from the rolling wagons was a bust before it was tried. A moving wagon of that era was about as steady as a sleigh being drug across a field of dry boulders, and the bumping was enough to shake a piece of bread to pieces before it reached your mouth, let alone a drink of any description. Besides, the Cheyenne were in a formal mood and dismounted soon as they reached us, coming over to shake hands first, so we surely had to stop.

The fellow in the plug hat was their leader. He wore one of those silver medals that the Government give out to principal men at treaty signings; I think his showed the image of President Fillmore. He was older than the others and he carried an ancient musket with a barrel four foot long.

Now I haven’t referred to her before, but my eldest sister was six foot tall and, being very strong of feature, she was still unmarried at more than twenty years of age: a great big rawboned girl with a head of flaming orange hair. She used to spell Pa in driving the ox team and could throw a whip better than any of the men except Edward Walsh, who was an Irishman out of Boston weighing two hundred pounds and as a Catholic never cared for Pa’s preaching but was tolerant about it since other than his family there wasn’t any more of his own kind along; the others tolerated him because he was so big.

This sister’s name was Caroline, and on account of her size and doing a man’s work, she wore men’s clothing on the trail—boots, pants, shirt, and flop hat—although there were those who thought the worse of her for it.

A very athletic person and a stranger to fear, she hopped from the box to the ground on the Indians’ approach, and Plug Hat marched up to her, sticking out his brown right hand while the left held the old musket across his front and also kept his red blanket from falling off.

Right pleased to make your acquaintance, says Caroline, who is a deal bigger than the old chief, and gives him a grip so hard you can see the pain travel up through his hat and down the other arm. He almost lost his blanket. His chest was naked underneath, and that’s how I saw his medal and also a scar across his belly that looked like a weld on a piece of iron. That provided the name he was known by among the whites, Scar Belly, though among the Cheyenne he was called Old Lodge Skins, Mohk-se-a-nis, and also Painted Thunder, Wohk-pe-nu-numa, and I never did know his real name, which among Indians is a secret; and if you find it out and call him by it he will at the least be terrible insulted and at the worst have ten years of bad luck.

Old Lodge Skins (at present he didn’t identify himself, which always seems irrelevant to an Indian, but I was to see a lot of him in afterdays), when he recovered from Caroline’s shake, give a speech in Cheyenne, which was one phase of his courtesy and the other was that in between sentences he said the English words he knew, goddam and Jesus Christ, which he had been taught for a joke by earlier immigrants and the soldiers at Laramie, and didn’t of course understand was cursing and wouldn’t have known if it was explained, on account of Indians don’t have swearing in their languages though they have lots of things that are taboo: for example, after you are married you can’t mention the name of your mother-in-law.

My Pa was standing alongside Caroline, and I don’t recall what it was upset him most, the swearing or the attention my sister was getting, but he pushed out in front of her, saying, If you was looking for the wagonmaster and spiritual leader of this flock, that be me, Your Honor.

Him and Old Lodge Skins then shake hands, and the latter fetches from a beaded pouch he carries in the vicinity of his belly a filthy, tattered hunk of paper on which some other white wag had scrawled the following:

This heer is Skar-gut he is a good indun and takes a bath unse a yar wether he needs it or not he won’t cut your thoat under enny condishun so long as you keep a gun on him his heart is as black as his hind end yer fren

BILLY B. DARN

The chief evidently figured this to be a recommendation, because he looked right proud while my brother Bill was reading it aloud on request of my Pa (that’s the reason I said earlier I don’t think Pa could read himself; but it’s more than a hundred year ago and I don’t remember everything).

Pa was a considerate person to strangers, especially if they was savages, so he pretended the note said something good and invited the whole bunch to come have a drink, which I don’t believe the Cheyenne understood right off. Whiskey they would have known, but Pa put it some long way, potation or whatever—and they still didn’t get it when Troy and our men broke out the jugs. You see, an Indian figures no white man in his right mind would give them liquor unless he had a running start. The traders always left the whiskey negotiation till last, brought out the barrels, and rode off fast as they could go.

Indians are first to admit they can’t hold their liquor, and even in those early days some of the chiefs tried to keep it from their young men, though a redskin leader has only advisory power which is frequently ignored. Old Lodge Skins could not believe ten white men, counting the larger boys, half of them unarmed and with only two horses and having seven wagons full of twelve women and girls and eight smaller children, would feed whiskey to two score Cheyenne braves on the open prairie. If he had, he would have warned my Pa before he took a drink, because Indians are fair that way. They don’t feel any guilt about what they do under the influence of liquor, regarding it as a mysterious sort of power like a tornado—and you don’t see reason to blame yourself for knocking a fellow down if a high wind picks you up and throws you into him; although if you see it coming you would tell him to move clear. So with an Indian when he hits the booze, if he hasn’t anything against you.

Old Lodge Skins took the tin cup my Pa handed him and drained it in one swallow, as if it was water or cold coffee, tilting his head back so far the plug hat fell off. The drink was already down his gullet before he altogether comprehended the nature of it, and you might say simultaneous with that recognition he became instantly drunk, his eyes swimming with liquid like two raw eggs. He fell over backwards on the earth and kicked his feet so hard one moccasin flew off and hit the cover of our wagon. His musket dropped, muzzle down, and packed some dirt in the end of the barrel, of which we’ll hear more later.

Meanwhile our men politely ignored him and passed on to the other Indians. Not having brought out more cups, they handed around the jugs, grinning and shaking hands, and Troy thought his idea was proceeding so well that he started a practice of slapping the braves on the shoulder as if they was saloon cronies. Now I could see, at the age of ten, that the Cheyenne didn’t get the import of that: giving him a present with one hand and striking him with the other, and both by an individual of a different race, would call an Indian’s whole code of manners into question, as it would with a horse you fed and flogged at the same time.

The others weren’t so quick to fall drunk like Old Lodge Skins, with whom it was more the surprise than the beverage. Having seen him, they were somewhat prepared—well as a redskin can ever be—and went under the influence by stages: sort of pathetic gratitude when they was handed the jug, puzzlement when Troy hit their shoulder, then a slow beginning of elation when the stuff hit the stomach—all this fairly quiet, except of course for the how-how’s and mutterings of satisfaction.

We might still have got away after everybody had one round apiece, but Old Lodge Skins come back to life, got up, and indicated he would swap his pinto pony, his plug hat, his Government medal, his musket, in fact, everything down to the breechclout, for a second swallow.

Never mind that, says Pa. It ain’t going to cost a desert patriarch nothing to partake of our hospitality. I just wish I could talk Hebrew. With that, he hands the chief a whole jug all for himself.

Troy gives seconds to a flat-nosed brave and claps his back. This fellow, whose name was Hump, swallows slow, licks his lips, hands back the jug, grimaces like he smells something stinking, then begins to howl like a coyote under a full moon. Everybody else is still quiet at this point, so it sounded funny, and Old Lodge Skins takes a breath between pulls at his own jug and looks glassy-eyed at Hump, which seems to annoy the latter, for he draws his iron tomahawk and starts at the chief, who lifts up the ancient musket and fires it at the other, but the earth, remember, is packed into the muzzle and the barrel peels back, like a banana skin, almost to the lock.

Nevertheless, Hump is scared by the explosion and also unable to reply in kind because he doesn’t possess a firearm himself, but only a bow slung over his shoulder along with a quiverful of arrows. He turns slowly, licking his lips, and sees Troy, who is handing refreshment to a young brave called Shadow That Comes in Sight (these names I learned later). Hump studies Troy’s back for a spell, then pats him with the left hand like Troy had done him, at which the white man turns, hearty as a fellow at a lodge meeting (he and Pa and our others have ignored the gunshot), and Hump plants the hatchet blade into his forehead. It was one of those trade tomahawks of which the reverse of the head is a pipe that can be smoked by boring a hole through the handle.

Troy looks cross-eyed for a minute at the wooden grip that extends over and parallel to his nose, then Hump withdraws the weapon, letting his victim go over backwards spewing blood. Shadow That Comes in Sight, wearing a numb look, catches up the jug from Troy as the latter goes down. Hump claws at Shadow, who smashes him in the face with the stone vessel, so hard it breaks and they are both dripping with spirits. Hump’s right nostril is severed from his nose except for a little skin string, and there seems to be a general net of gore containing his entire face, but he joins Shadow, now that their point of difference is soaking into the ground, in a fresh assault on the nearest jug.

From this juncture on, the altercation becomes general and the noise very barbaric: yells, howls, squeals, and screams, the snicker of steel on bone, the mushy murmur of flesh being laid open, the blast of gunfire, and the wind of arrows as they left and the whonk of their arrival.

The women and us kids stayed back by the wagons, and though I could not make out my Pa in the middle of the pack, I could hear his yawp above all that din: Brethren, where have I failed? Then he gargled on a throatful of fluid and blew out his spark. Next time I saw him, on the morning after, the arrows staked him to the ground like a hide stretched out to dry. Yet he still wore his scalp, for this was whiskey and not war, and not being in their right minds, the Indians didn’t take trophies. They fought among their own likewise as with the whites, and Pile of Bones blew out the back of White Contrary’s head with a cap-and-ball pistol and his brains run out like water from a punctured canteen; he swayed for a long time before he dropped, retaining the jug that had cost him life itself, and Pile of Bones had to hack it from the hands of a corpse.

Walsh, who being Irish had hit the spirits in the wagon before he went to serve the Cheyenne, pulled a knife from his boot, but it got turned in the rush upon him and pierced his own belly; he was dying with terrible sounds. Otherwise, our fellows went down without resistance. Farthest out, I could recognize Jacob Worthing by his boot-bottoms, with the new soles put on at Laramie. John Clairmont, an Illinoisan, lay with his head pointed towards the wagons; I knew him by his baldness. And from the center of the tumult already over, sprouted a little thicket of arrows from among the matted grass. These turned out later to be fixed in my Pa, although at the time I didn’t know that but saw the feathered ends as a type of prairie bush.

For a while after the whites were disposed of, the Cheyenne that were left kept sucking at the jugs and paid no mind to the women and children. Which explains how Worthing’s wife and kid were able to get away: she picked up her boy and started running, with the wagons as cover between them and the Indians, towards the Laramie Mountains, snow-capped so far away though near-seeming the way eminences are on the prairie. You could see the Mrs. and child for onto a mile, intermittently between their sinking into swells and then coming into sight again on the upward slope; finally they disappeared over a bluff and I have never heard of them from that day to this. The rest of us just stood there dumbstruck, not even crying.

But little Troy at this point up and made a desperate move. He run out to his daddy’s body, took a butcher knife off a scabbard in its belt, and stuck the side of a tall Cheyenne who was singing a drunken dirge in between pulls of a jug. An Indian admires that kind of ginger in a kid, and if this particular specimen had not been liquored up he might have give him a present and a strong name, but he was in the demon’s grip, and raised the lance on which he had been leaning and drove the boy off the ground on its point, which come out the back of his blue shirt directly, accompanied by a great blossom of scarlet. The Cheyenne kicked him free, and he struck the prairie with the sound of a wet rag being slapped onto a bar-top.

The boy would run from a lad his own age but took on a six-foot savage. As to yours truly, I believe at that time the other children looked on me as a bully though I was underweight and no bigger than a sparrow, for I was the youngest in my family and knocked about a good deal by my brothers and sisters, for which treatment I would pay back them to whom I was not kin. But seeing white men get punishment of this fashion from Indians, I have to admit I let the water drain into my pants.

About a dozen Cheyenne were still conscious when the whiskey was all gone, though some lay flat as the dead and wounded and put a glazed stare upon the sky. Others sat upon their skinny haunches, looking glassily into the crotch, and some whined like injured hounds. Old Lodge Skins was squatting there with his seamed face turned towards Caroline. After all that turmoil, in which, having his own jug, he had not participated except perhaps to set it off, he was yet trying to figure out what her game was, and on my sister’s part she was studying him, I think right through the worst of the carnage. Since a year or so back, she had been a peculiar type of person, somewhat forward with the male sex but on the order of another man rather than a harlot.

Hump busted the last jug with his hatchet and run each fragment over his tongue. His nose was dripping fresh blood from where that nostril had since come altogether off and got lost, and his chin ran red, subsequently dyeing his bone breastplate, but he was basically a friendly-looking Indian even now. He had the widest mouth I ever saw on a human being, and his nose, broad to begin with, was smashed more so. For a Cheyenne his eyes were large. He put them in our direction, going over us one by one.

It is true that save Mrs. Worthing and her boy, nobody tried to get away; and except for young Troy, none did any fighting back. You didn’t see no rifle-shooting pioneer women with our train. Even Caroline did not know another weapon than her bullwhip. Which she had been holding all this while in her left hand by the stock, the long tail trailing on the prairie behind her. She had no lack of targets to crack it at, but just stood peering at the old chief.

One of our couples was originally out of Germany, called by everybody Dutch Rudy and Dutch Katy, simply the two of them without offspring. Round, pink-faced individuals, two hundred pounds apiece and losing not a gram in those weeks upon the trail, on account of they had brought their wagon filled with potatoes. I could now see Dutch Rudy’s belly rising like a hillock from the plain, some yards out. Dutch Katy was leaning against their wagon, two along from ours, wearing her blue sunbonnet, and where her hair showed it was pale and fine as cornsilk. Like all women of them days she was more or less shapeless in her dress, except there was a lot more of her. She was a great hunk of flesh, and on her is where Hump’s eyes came to stay after their travel.

Across he staggered, and Katy knowed it was for her and started to appeal in Dutch, but as after a bit it was clear he didn’t mean to kill her, or not anyway until he had his pleasure, she went down on the ground slowly as if melted by the sun, and Hump ripped at the gingham and stuffs beneath until he laid her thick flanks bare, pressing his swarthiness between them, him all dirt, blood, and sweat and coughing like a mule. Dutch Katy, like all her countrymen, had always been a maniac for keeping clean. She used to wash at every stop, going in the river while wearing a loose dress for modesty, and had had some close escapes from the quicksand of which the Platte was full. I remember once they had to throw a line over her and draw her out by ox.

This event touched off a general movement by the Cheyenne towards our women, and since there was more of the former than the latter, again the strife began which had so lately ended over the whiskey, and again Indian felled Indian, but enough was left to mount the widows of Troy and Clairmont, and the Jackson sisters—and if you think there was outcry on the part of the victims, you are wrong; while those who were not raped stood watching those who were as if waiting their own turn, their children clustered around them.

Now Caroline at last woke up when Spotted Wolf come towards my mother. She shouted at Old Lodge Skins, who simply grinned in answer. My fifteen-year-old brother Bill, and Tom who was twelve, they broke and run under the wagon, among the buckets hanging there.

That left me, with my wet pants, and my sisters Sue Ann, thirteen, and Margaret, eleven, and we was hugging Ma.

Caroline tried once again to get the chief’s intervention, but it’s likely that he never knew what she wanted and it’s sure he could have done nothing if he had, and the shadow of Spotted Wolf, an enormous Indian, was already across us and we could smell his stink. My Ma was praying in a low moan. I looked up and saw the Cheyenne’s face, which was not wearing what you generally think of as a cruel or indecent expression but rather one kind of dreamy and genial, like he had every O.K. for his lust.

At that moment the black lash of Caroline’s whip snaked around his throat, drawing up the bear-claw necklace there, and he went over backwards, cracking his head on a rock and didn’t get up.

You go with the kids to climb in the wagon, Ma, said Caroline, coolly withdrawing her whip into a big loop. None of these individuals will trouble you further. Caroline was completely self-possessed as she said this; she was as arrogant as my Pa.

Old Lodge Skins was pointing at the unconscious body of Spotted Wolf and laughing his guts out. That irked Caroline, but also pleased her, and she flicked her whip sort of flirty at the chief. He flopped onto his back with his arms crucified and laughed his old mouth, dark as a cave full of bats, into the sun. His foot was still bare and his busted gun lay near him like the skeleton of an open umbrella.

Ma did what Caroline said, gathered us kids together, including the two cowards down among the ox dung, and we went into the wagon, where we found room for all of us though there really wasn’t any, what with the furniture, boxes, and bags that represented our worldly goods. Tom’s shoe was in my face, rather nasty considering what he had walked in, and I was wrapped around a barrel now full of crockery but which had once held salt-fish and never lost the aroma, but we was lucky to be alive, so you didn’t hear no complaints.

All afternoon we stayed there; it was like being closed up in a bag lying in the sun, because the junk in the wagon bed cut off the air without insulating any. Outside the noise died away within an hour, and when after midafternoon Bill took nerve to raise the side canvas and peep from under, he reported no one standing within the range of his eye.

We then all shivered at the squeak of somebody climbing into the box out front, but Caroline soon poked her head in through the puckered opening and said: All quiet, folks. You stay where you are and don’t worry none. I’ll be sitting right here all night.

Ma whispered: Can you do anything for your poor Pa, Caroline? What become of him?

He is stone-dead, said Caroline, plenty disgusted, and all the rest along with him, and I got enough to do right here without keeping the buzzards off them.

You know, said Ma, addressing us all, if he had had time to learn the Hebrew lingo he would have been all right.

Yes, Ma’m, answered Caroline and withdrew.

I managed after a while to drop off and wrapped around that barrel I stayed asleep till dawn, at which time Sue Ann poked me awake with a spade handle maneuvered through the baggage. They were all the rest of them up and out, and I crawled forth sore of body but empty of mind until I touched the earth and heard the sound of shovels. The surviving women—and that I believe was all of them, for they had been smart enough not to resist, and when finished the drunken Indians had been too weak for further mayhem and collapsed—were digging graves with the help of the older children.

Already before dark on the afternoon before, what with the hot sun, the coyotes and carrion birds had got quick wind of the matter and paid the field a visit. The results was fairly evil. Now with people moving, the birds wheeled high and the coyotes sat out on the prairie just beyond gun range.

The Cheyenne were all gone, and their dead with them. When I asked Caroline, who claimed to have been awake all night and would know, she said: Don’t you worry none about that, but go and help the folks with Pa.

It was then I saw my Pa for the last time, as hitherto described. Ma and the rest of the family unpinned his body from the ground, and we lowered him into the shallow grave dug by Caroline and filled it in, which took quite a few shovelfuls, as I recall, to cover the end of his nose. Nearby, Dutch Katy was performing the same service for Dutch Rudy. She was wearing a fresh dress and her fair hair was dark with wet: it was plain she had already been down to the river for her bath. I won’t say I never saw a dirty German, but the clean ones go to an excess.

Now we was just finished putting our menfolk under the sod, when someone looked up and shrieked like a crow, and there was the Cheyenne coming down the rise. There was now but three of them, Old Lodge Skins and two braves, the latter each leading four riderless ponies. They showed no preparation for violence, but this second appearance was too much for most, and for the first time our people began to yell and cry. Back under the wagon went Tom and Bill. Caroline was the exception. I remember while grabbing onto her bony hips in my own fright, looking up at her face I observed a rather keen look about the nostrils like a horse’s when he smells water.

The other two, with their herd, stayed back some thirty yards while Old Lodge Skins rode forward on his brown-and-white pinto, which had painted rings around the eyes. He put up his hand and orated for about fifteen minutes in a queer falsetto. His plug hat was a little more crushed than yesterday but otherwise he appeared in perfect shape.

It was strange how in no time at all everybody went from fear to being excruciatingly bored, and the very women who yesterday had been helpless victims and just minutes earlier were howling in fright, now began to advance on him threatening with their fists and saying: Git on out of here, you old skunk! Which shows something about the way a female is put together; she will suffer any outrage so long as it is interesting, but bore her and she don’t know fear.

But Caroline spoke up. Settle down, now, said she, swaggering out in front of the crowd. "Don’t you understand they come back for me? That’s what the horses is for, to pay for hauling me off. You noticed yesterday, didn’t you, that I wasn’t touched while all that nasty business was being done to you? They was saving me, was what they was doing." My sister’s cheeks were a deal more ruddy than the sun could be held accountable for, and she was tossing around her copper hair like the flies was at her face.

Now, you’d better let them take me, she went on, unless you want to get kilt like the men.

But Caroline, Ma asked plaintively, what in the world do they want you for?

Probly torture me in various devilish ways, Caroline answered very proudly. I thought it a strange thing to boast about, myself, but held my peace, because what I could see was that my sister reminded me of nobody so much as my Pa. That poor thing was determined to be extravagant.

The Widow Walsh then said: Ah, go on, then. I ain’t stopping them, and turned away, the rest of the women with her. They had lost their men and been raped and were stranded in the wilderness, and there was no way back but that by which they had been months in coming, so they could hardly be much moved by what happened to one girl.

Old Lodge Skins was impassively sitting his horse, watching us through droopy eyelids. On the wooden saddle hung his shield, round, made of hide, and adorned with ten black scalps. In place of the blown-up musket he now carried a lance from the shaft of which dangled a couple more hanks of hair. He wasn’t a bad-looking dog, or hadn’t been in his youth, anyway, whenever that was; his braids now were shot with gray and the muscles of his limbs were stringy. It is hard to tell an Indian’s age, but he must have been within smelling distance of seventy. He grew a big nose with a long, hooking sweep to it, and the ends of his mouth had slight upward twists, whereas his eyes was sad. He generally wore a sort of good-natured melancholy as to expression. You couldn’t say he looked dangerous in any wise; indeed, it was rather Caroline who seemed savage at this juncture.

She had been a tomboy but was getting on in years, and the men never took to her back in Evansville except as a pal. She had got a crush on the local blacksmith, a widower of forty, and hung around the forge, but as far as he went was to let her hold a horse’s hoof while he shoed it. Then there was some farmer’s son: I think for a time they spread manure together, forked hay, and the like. Not even them drummers who came and went, of whom it was said they would screw a snake if somebody’d hold its head, paid her attention as a woman. White men had never done much good for her, you see, and now Pa and the others with the wagons had got themselves killed.

I mention this to explain Caroline’s peculiar manner at that time. I think she was also humiliated at not having been raped.

Well, Caroline, said Ma, standing there in her long, washed-out dress and sunbonnet; she looked like one of them little dolls you can make out of a hollyhock blossom with a bud for its head. My Ma was small, not far over five feet, and I reckon my lifelong shortness is due to hers. Well, Caroline, I expect we will have to go back to Laramie. I’ll tell the soldiers and they’ll come to fetch you.

I wouldn’t count on that, replied Caroline. Indins know all about how to hide their tracks.

Well, then, Ma said, you must drop a button now and again, or a piece of your shirt, to lay a trail.

Caroline impatiently scraped the sweat from her forehead and wiped the hand on the butt of her jeans. She believed, I think, that Ma was trying to diminish her danger and self-concocted glory, and the direct result of that was the cooking of my goose.

Maybe they won’t hurt me permanently, said Caroline. Maybe they’ll hold me for ransom. I don’t expect to be murdered, or why would they want Jack to come along, too?

That awful whimper, I discovered after a bit, was issuing from my own throat. Hearing my name had set it off.

To her credit my Ma went up to Old Lodge Skins’s horse and begged him not to take me, on account of I was her youngest and only ten years old and skinny. He nodded with sympathy, but when she was done he beckoned to his followers, who rode in and tied all eight horses to our wagon as if the deal had been closed. Even then the subsequent events might have failed to transpire had not the Cheyenne hung around for a bit in the hopes they would get a cup of coffee! Indians simply never understood whites and vice versa.

Bill will take one of the ponies and ride back for the soldiers fast as he can go, Ma said, giving me a great hug. Don’t think bad of your Pa, Jack. He done the best he could, given his vision. Maybe by taking you and Caroline, the Indians are trying after their own fashion to make up for what they done yesterday. I don’t think they’re bad people, Jack, or they wouldn’t have brung the horses.

There you had it. Nobody thought to ask Caroline how she knew what the Cheyenne were up to without speaking their language. There was a time when I suspected my Ma actually wanted to get rid of us, because the soldiers never came; which was before I found out, some years on, that Bill rode back to Laramie, sold the horse, got a job with the traders, and not only never reported about us to the Army but also never rejoined the wagons. No, my Ma was well-meaning but ignorant. My Pa was crazy and my brother was a traitor. Then there was Caroline. They weren’t much of a family, I guess, but then I was not with them long.

Ma give us each a kiss, and Caroline mounted one of the ponies brought by the Indians, pulling me up behind. The other kids waved in silence, Bill with a dirty, scared grin. Old Lodge Skins, dawdling about nearby on his horse, grunted quizzically and covered his lips. I didn’t know then that this is how Indians show astonishment—their mouth falls open and they cover it so their soul can’t jump out and run away.

He thereupon gave evidence of wanting to make another speech, but Caroline motioned him to come on, dug her heels into the mount, which was skittish owing to its unfamiliarity with white hindquarters, and we went off like a cannon shot, heading north.

At top of the rise, she pulled in on the rawhide bridle and waited for the three Cheyenne, who weren’t in no hurry, I’ll say that for them. Then we rode on down to the river, which was yellow and swollen from the spring rains, and swam the ponies across, I holding onto the tail of ours and spinning behind like a lure on a fishline.

CHAPTER 2 Boiled Dog

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the river, Caroline fetched me up on the pony’s rump again, and said in a new sappy, romantic way that would have been pathetic were I not numb from fear and now swamped with the muddy water of the Platte: Maybe, Jack, I’m going to be an Indin princess in feathers and beads.

I never had rode horse much before, and already it was beginning to get me in the crotch and hams from jolting up and slamming down at every stride; and if I dug my heels into the beast’s yellow haunches, he would blow out his belly and try to shiver his arse out from under mine. I had not made a friend in that animal, which was a pity being as he was my sole means of support in a vast and alien land populated by savages.

One of the latter came up alongside us at that moment, namely Old Lodge Skins himself, whom the river crossing had changed as to personality. I later found he had a special feeling about the Platte, regarding it as the southern boundary of his territory and when on the other side felt foolish and irresponsible, whereas when north of it came back to normal, whatever that was. Anyway, once he rode in out of the water, he gave us a stern look from under his hat, pointed back over a bony shoulder protruding from his blanket, as if to say Get behind, and trotted his animal up the bank.

We followed, our horse making the bluff in a couple of tries owing to his double load—not that I was that much extra weight, but rather because he never lost an opportunity to let me know I was an imposition.

Now when Indians travel, they go every which way according to their personal taste. Them two braves who had come with the chief didn’t cross at the same place as us. One rode down a hundred yards and swum his pony over, and the other went upstream for about a mile, then the river took a bend and he went around it out of sight. I guess he knew a better place. We didn’t see him again for an hour, until we come over a rise, and there he sat on the earth, his mount grazing nearby. Old Lodge Skins passed him without so much as a look, and the brave returned the compliment. The latter started singing, though, in an awful moaning fashion that we could hear for a long time thereafter, when so far off he looked like a tiny bush.

After I had lived some time with the Cheyenne and learned their peculiarities, I remembered that incident and realized that the fellow had been in a mood. Something had offended him—maybe the river crossing he used had turned out to be full of quicksand or a frog on the shore called him an insulting name—and he moped along full of depression, and deciding to die, he sat down and began to sing his death song. In the old days before the coming of the whites, other than in battle Indians never kicked off except from shame. But the white men brought a number of diseases—like smallpox, which wiped out the entire Mandan nation—and that took the point away from dying for moral reasons, so it was cut out for the most part, although some willful individuals like our friend might try upon occasion.

Apparently it didn’t work this time because I saw the same fellow next day in camp, where he was peering into a little trade mirror and plucking out facial hair with a bone tweezer. His vanity had got the upper hand, so he must have recovered by then.

The riding got somewhat easier because the chief proceeded in a slow walk and every half mile or so stopped altogether, turned to us, and made certain hand signals accompanied by noises in his heathen tongue—communications which Caroline interpreted as statements of admiration for herself and suchlike rot. Then he would stare sadly at us for a minute and head on.

Now I better explain part of the secret at this point, as long as you understand what neither Old Lodge Skins nor me got the hang of it until quite a spell afterward. As to Caroline, well, it’s useless to speculate about what she thought she knew or what she imagined, because they was always all mixed together.

The main thing was that the chief had not made a deal to buy me and Caroline back at the wagons. What he done instead was make a long statement on the massacre, excusing the Cheyenne from any responsibility for it; but to be decent, because he liked white men still at this time and he also figured to get blamed when the story reached the troops at Laramie, he brought them horses to pay for the men that were killed.

So there we were, what with Caroline’s taste for romance and the gift for jumping to conclusions she inherited from our Pa, trailing Old Lodge Skins across the prairie under a terrible misapprehension. The chief thought we was following him to get more reparation and the speeches he made at them stops was to protest against the injustice of our hounding him like coyotes, who will sometimes follow you for miles.

Caroline stared at him in love, and that poor Indian interpreted it as the look of ruthless extortion. In later years I grew greatly fond of Old Lodge Skins. He had more bad luck than any human being I have ever known, red or white, and you can’t beat that for making a man