“Yes, and his wife and children. And many more, whom I will name only if you intend to mourn them, although that was several winters ago and now they will have reached the Other Side where the water is sweet, the buffalo abundant, and where there are no white men.”
The latter designation he pronounced nowadays in a special way: not exactly hatefully, for Old Lodge Skins was too much a man to sit about and revile his enemies. That was for a loser, like the Rebs what lost the Civil War. And he wasn’t a loser. He wasn’t a winner, maybe, but neither was he a failure. You couldn’t call the Cheyenne flops unless they had had a railroad engine of their own which never worked as well as the U.P.’s or had invented a gun that didn’t shoot straight.
Just to check my impression, I asks him: “Do you hate the Americans?”
“No,” he says, closing up his gleaming though dead eyes. “But now I understand them. I no longer believe they are fools or crazy. I know now that they do not drive away the buffalo by mistake or accidentally set fire to the prairie with their fire-wagon or rub out Human Beings because of a misunderstanding. No, they
“But white men believe that everything is dead: stones, earth, animals, and people, even their own people. And if, in spite of that, things persist in trying to live, white men will rub them out.
“That,” he concludes, “is the difference between white men and Human Beings.”
Then I looked close at the scalp he stroked, which was of the silkiest blonde. For a moment I was sure it come from Olga’s dear head, and reckoned also he had little Gus’s fine skull-cover someplace among his filthy effects, the stinking old savage, living out his life of murder, rapine, and squalor, and I almost knifed him before I collected myself and realized the hair was honeyer than my Swedish wife’s.
I mention this because it shows how a person’s passion can reverse on the instant he is reminded of his own loss. I had just been moved by Sand Creek, and the next minute was ready to kill him.
Now, Old Lodge Skins took cognizance of my state though blind.
“Have you,” he asks, “a great sorrow or is it only bitterness?”
So I told him, and he never heard of the incident in which Olga and Gus was taken. He could not have lied. I have said that it is amazing what and how Indians know about events far distant from them; but likewise there are things they do not hear. In that era the capturing of white women and children was commonplace. A Cheyenne of one band might not know of those took by another, unless they camped together.
Then Old Lodge Skins said: “Our young men are angry nowadays. Many times they have not the patience to wait to ransom or exchange prisoners, but will become crazy with rage and rub them out. But was that not the voice of Sunshine I just heard outside my tepee? She is the widow of Little Shield, who was killed two moons ago, but now she will be your new wife and give you a new son, so that you have what you had before and better, for of course a woman of the Human Beings is superior to any other kind.”
He wasn’t being heartless, just making the best of likelihoods, as an Indian had to do in the sort of life he lived. His own two wives was massacred, and so he had mourned them for the proper time and then got himself replacements. These last had come and gone in the tepee while we talked: young women, sisters again, probably fifty year below the chief in age, but by God if they didn’t both look pregnant to me.
“All right,” I said. “But I tell you this, that if I find my first woman and my son again, I will take them back from whatever man is keeping them. And if they have been rubbed out, I will kill whoever did it.”
“Of course,” said Old Lodge Skins, for there wasn’t nothing an Indian could better understand than revenge, and he would have scorned me only if I had not wanted it.
