I missed both of them fellows, for a like reason. I didn’t have no friends at all, other than Old Lodge Skins, and no private, personal enemies. There was plenty of surliness towards me, as I have said, and no more than I had learned to more or less walk unobtrusive past the young men of Old Lodge Skins’s band, we joined the enormous gathering around Black Kettle and the run-ins started all over again, for though the Cheyenne was officially supposed to be at peace now, they didn’t figure it to apply to white men and was still raiding the ranches and farms as long as the weather continued good, so they’d ride back in and see me and go for their weapons even in the middle of our village. It wasn’t
As to Little Horse, the pressure was off him because of his way of life and he was ever pleasurable company, good for a song or dance or light conversation, not having to worry constantly about his manhood and medicine as a Cheyenne warrior always did. So far as
Little Horse and Younger Bear: I met both of them fellows in that great camp down on the Washita River, and I’m going to tell you about it.
Late November was the time of year, the river skinned with ice and a foot of snow in the valley that would warm some in the day and then freeze into a crust at night, so if you got outside of the beaten-down floor of the campground you’d crash and crunch like a herd of buffalo and maybe cut your ankles into the bargain. Indians was still coming in from all points to this their winter quarters: war parties as well as whole villages with women, children, horse herds, and dogs. After they was settled, I’d always nose around for white faces, and having had so many unpleasant encounters with testy braves, I had got to painting myself as I done at the battle of Solomon’s Fork years ago and traded a couple of Sunshine’s dressed deerskins to a medicine man for one of them buffalo-head hats complete with horns, to hide my ginger hair. Only I didn’t use colored paint, but rather dead black made from charcoal and grease. Otherwise, my settlement clothes having worn out anyway, I wore leggings and a blue blanket. People still knew I was white, but I think thought better of me for having gone Indian as much as humanly possible.
Well sir, on this day of which I speak, a village had come in and settled on the river about a mile below us near the big horseshoe bend of the Washita, where the water was maybe eight foot deep right off the bank, which the ones who knew the place was telling the new people in case they’d want to take that cold bath the Cheyenne go in for of a morning. By God, some of them did, plunged right in while the women was setting up the lodges and swum in that chill with the fragments of ice keeping them company. That’s when I happened along and made out Younger Bear in the middle of the stream. He had a funny mode of swimming: on alternate strokes his head would rise from the water to the flanges of his nose, his eyes staying shut as the wash streamed down over them, and since he wasn’t breathing through his mouth, the effect was as though a corpse was floating up off the bottom.
While watching him, I heard myself being greeted in a voice that was too melodious for either a Cheyenne brave or a grown woman but like a young girl’s, and I turned and there was Little Horse. He wore the most beautiful dress of white antelope skin, with an eight-inch fringe, that I ever seen. The bosom was magnificently stitched with glass beads of every hue and even in that cold winter sun give the impression of how the Northern Lights might look if illuminating the Grand Canyon. And he wore a half-dozen bracelets and a string of beads so long they should have tripped him, and his earlobes was stretched like melting taffy by the weight of the great copper disks he carried there.
The manner in which he approached me, I figured he was trying to pick me up, so I says quick who I was.
And he says: “Oh yes, I know you,” and giggles, which I guess by now had become his habit, so while it got upon my nerves, I tried not show it for old times’ sake.
We held a little reunion there on the riverbank among the trampled snow, and of course he never asked me what I was doing here, for that would have been impolite between two fellows raised together, but I did have to submit to an embrace that was more sisterly than brotherly.
“You left your father’s band?” I asks after I got out of his clutches.
