By time I got to the door again, the bluecoats was so close they fired beyond our lodge into those in the timber behind. To leave by that egress would have put me under their hoofs, so with my knife I slashed a rent in the back and slipped through it. Indians was coming out everywhere, some not getting far before they went under, others diving behind cottonwoods and subsequently delivering a return fire, mainly arrows, but the targets was bad and their own folk running between.
The cavalry pounded in among the lodges now, the band still playing out in the open valley where they rested. That music was driving me batty. I belly-flopped behind a tree. I had not yet fired my piece, but not because of delicacy. No, I would have dropped them troopers without mercy had I the wherewithal to do it: they was ravaging my home, had killed two of my women, and because of them my dearest wife and newborn boy lay in uttermost jeopardy. At such a time you see no like betwixt yourself and enemy, be he your brother by blood or usage.
But my gun was empty. Around the lodge I kept it unloaded in case them children got to tinkering. The ammunition rested in that pouch under Digging Bear’s body, some fifty yards of galloping cavalry from where I lay.
Some Cheyenne had went to the river, leaped in, and was using the high bank as fortification behind which they covered the retreat down the center of the icy stream by a large body of women and children. I thought I saw Corn Woman and her young among them, but the gun smoke was thick now and closed across about that time, and when it cleared a trooper’s horse was shot under him and fell into my line of vision. I was distracted by the sight of them saddlebags, where the cavalrymen generally packed their extra ammunition. I run towards it, but before I got there the animal clumb to its feet and galloped away riderless. Just stunned, I reckon. But the trooper was hurt worse. He lay with his left boot at a strange angle from his upper leg. He was a young fellow, hardly beyond a boy, with a newly started mustache. Him and me, our eyes met, and a blaze come into his as they was windows in back of which somebody just fired a torch, but it was dying caused it and not recognition, for the next instant his head pitched forward showing the back of the skull busted open like an orange. And the Cheyenne who did it, using a wooden war club embedded with a triangular blade of rusty iron, took the lad’s carbine and cartridge belt and dashed for the river, whooping, but got his own as he leaped the bank, belched blood as he hit the water, and sank in frothing commotion.
Already the troops had passed into the lower reaches of the village, the noise suddenly half-distant as if from a fight in the room next door. I had a mind to go back to my lodge and fetch the cartridges from underneath Digging Bear, but knew the soldiers would soon reverse for the clean-up and my activity might bring them down on where Sunshine was hid, so I run among the other tepees, and that was when I saw the stout body of Black Kettle, sprawled near his lodge door. He had signed his last treaty. Sand Creek and now this. His wife lay nearby, still dying.
Old Lodge Skins, I thought: I must get to him. He’d be helpless now, with no sons and blind. So I doubled back, for his tepee was near my own, and on the way I passed numerous dead Indians and almost got shot by a wounded brave I didn’t know, but he went under before he could stretch the bowstring. The incident brought my appearance to mind. I hadn’t cleaned the black paint from my face of the day before—it keeps your nose and cheeks warm in winter—but some of it must have been scraped away in this or that activity since. Aside from that, my hair was wholly exposed. Well, I didn’t know what to do about it at the moment.
I plunged in through the entranceway of Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. Sure enough, he was still there. But he was not abandoned. Them two young wives of his was trying to get him to flee. The one had a baby strapped to her back. The other was especially wrought up, and automatically went for me with her butcher knife, though she used to see me often.
I held her off on the muzzle of my empty gun, and says: “You women run for it. I’ll help Grandfather.”
“Kill me then, too,” cries Tassel Woman, who had that knife.
“Get on out, you fool!” I yells, and stepping to the side, fetches her a swat in the ample hindquarters with the stock of the Ballard. “Go down to the river.”
That shook some sense into her, and the other with the baby said: “I believe you”; and they left.
“My son,” Old Lodge Skins remarked, quite casually. “Sit down beside me and we will smoke.”
Would you believe it? That old man set there upon his buffalo robe and commenced to fill his pipe.
“Grandfather, have you lost your wits? The bluecoats are wiping us out. We have only the time of a bird flight to get under the riverbank before they turn back.”
