About that time, a number of carbines begin to pour lead into the tepee; it sounded like we was in a beehive. But do we leave? No, Old Lodge Skins has first to get his sacred bow and quiver of arrows, and then a special blanket, and of course his powder horn and shot bag, and his pipe and tobacco case. I am loaded down with this crap, and the United States Cavalry is blowing out the front of the lodge.
I commence to curse in English and howl in Cheyenne, and try to push him through the slit I cut, but no use, he stands embedded like a tree and puts on the rest of his jewelry: bracelets, bear-claw necklace, breastplate of tiny bones, and the lot.
Now the soldiers set fire to the face of the lodge. I guess that’s when I might have started to cry. I didn’t care about being killed no more, would indeed have welcomed death, I think, if I could have got the suspense over. I say crying; it might have been laughter. Whatever, it was hysterical.
“Come, my son,” he says. “We cannot stay in this tepee all day. The soldiers are about to burn it down.”
So after all that, it is him who leads me out, my legs like tubes of sand. Now of course not even the cavalry was so dumb as to assault only the tepee door. They was around back, too. We stepped directly into the reception of three troopers, and they fired pointblank, so close I don’t know why our hair didn’t burn from the flash.
All I can testify to is that they missed, and while the fearsome reports was still reverberating through my tortured eardrums, I heard Old Lodge Skins say: “Pay no attention to them, my son. I have now seen that it is not our day to die.”
If you have any sense, you won’t believe the following account of how we gained the river. I don’t, myself. But then you have to find another way to explain it, for here I am today and therefore I must have survived the Battle of the Washita in 1868.
Old Lodge Skins give me his rifle and he lifted that medicine bundle up before him in his two hands and started to sing. I saw then that the eyes of them troopers was not focused upon us, and we walked right past them while they fired again into the rip we had come out of. I heard one of them say: “We got them all, boys. Let’s have a look.” But another believed they should give it a few more rounds, so they went on pouring lead into that empty tepee.
The chief walked slowly on, in a dead line for the river, singing and holding high his medicine bundle. The soldiers was everywhere among the village now, mostly afoot but some still mounted, but neither kind made no difference to us. We walked right through them without incurring their interest of eye or ear, though the chief’s voice was loud, ranging from the heavy guttural to the piping falsetto, and in appearance we must have been a novelty, even in a Cheyenne camp: first, Old Lodge Skins, his blind eyes shut, and then me, with black-streaked face and sandy hair, leggings and blanket, and carrying all that rubbish and two empty rifles.
Now we approached the rear of a line of skirmishers firing at the Indians defending the riverbank, the whole action having moved downstream some from where I had first seen them, as the Cheyenne retreated slowly along. The main party of women and children was gone from sight, though some stragglers waded here and there in the cold Washita.
Well, he had kept it up so far, and I didn’t know why we wasn’t seen and shot down except maybe because the sheer audacity of the stunt made us invisible to the soldiers, but would he march through them skirmishers and into the crossfire?
He would and did, and we went untouched though, as if in accompaniment to his song, I heard much whistling of lead about my ears. But one thing happened: the Indians stopped shooting till we reached the bank.
Once me and Old Lodge Skins was in the Washita, the other Indians pushed us downstream after the women and children. Someone said: “Leave the river at the big bend, where the depth is over the head from shore to shore.”
I reckon they took me for the chief’s personal nurse in his blindness. I was reluctant to go, what with Sunshine and Morning Star still hiding beneath the robes in our tepee, so far as I knew. But I couldn’t do no good for them. The soldiers now had complete possession of the village and was already herding together such women and children as had neither resisted nor run. They’d no doubt soon find my two and add them to the captives, and all I’d accomplish by making an attempt at this time to liberate them would be to get myself executed as a renegade, if not shot down before my identification was established.
