Now that trooper who picked me up does me another favor. “If the general pleases,” that soldier says, “I found this man in the brush and had to kill an Injun to get him clear. He was hit in the head by an arrer, poor devil, and is out of his mind, I believe.”
I didn’t need no further cue. I laid my head on the side and sort of goggled my eyes, letting my tongue flap loose.
A spasm of impatience run over the general’s face. “Well, get him out of here,” he said. “This is a field headquarters, not the laboratory of an alienist.”
“Now,” said my benefactor, “if the general will hear the report of my scout—”
“No, I do not intend to,” responded the officer. “It cannot have much value if instead of observing the enemy’s dispositions, you were rescuing lunatics.” He jerks his back to us, and says to them others: “I have decided to shoot the captured ponies.”
One of them officers was a heavy-set, fatherly-looking man with a full head of white hair showing below his hat. I seen him gazing at me with a trace of amusement, as if he knowed the deal. But now he gets disturbed at what the general said and starts to protest.
“There are eight hundred ponies in that herd,” he says. “Had we not better save our ammunition for—”
“I have decided to shoot them,” says the general, “and do not require your suggestions upon the matter, Benteen.”
Benteen gives him a long look of undisguised scorn. Then he says in his benevolent way to the corporal, who was still standing with me alongside him: “You had better collect a detail of fifteen men and go and execute all of our four-legged prisoners. If you run out of ammunition, you might go over on the bluffs and borrow some from the Cheyenne.”
The corporal salutes him, and so do I, and I swear he winks at me. The general never saw it, though, for he was striding vigorously up and down in his smart boots, ordering things of various officers and men, and one of them is the director of the band, I guess, for shortly that group begins to play.
When we had gone on a ways by foot, the corporal says: “I’d think you would of knowed better than to let Hard Ass Custer catch you with your jacket open. He is a real son of a bitch, ain’t he? Goddam, I’d pay the Cheyenne what put a bullet in his brass heart.”
I said, “But that Benteen ain’t bad.”
“Ain’t bad?” exclaimed the corporal, right angry at my understatement. “I know fellows in his company would whip you for saying less than that he is the best officer who ever rode in the U.S. Goddam Cavalry.”
“That’s what I meant,” says I. Actually, at this point I was trying to find a chance to slip away from him and get to where the prisoners had been collected.
“You see how he looked at Custer? He don’t give a damn for him, I’ll tell you that. You can’t fight rank, but you don’t have to put your nose up in it, either, and the Colonel won’t. He’s right worried now over Major Elliot. Hard Ass won’t send out a patrol to look for him. That was what I was really doing out there when I run into you. You see anything of him?”
“Not me,” I says. That was when I realized it was probably Elliot and his command that the Cheyenne had wiped out and butchered in the grass across the river. I had been wise to throw away the badge from my hat.
“Benteen and Elliot served together in the War,” he says. “Well, we have to get shooting them horses. And you best find you a carbine if you can and praise your luck that Custer didn’t notice you’d lost yours. He’d of spread-eagled you in the snow.”
“I left it with my bunky,” says I, for I had learned the lingo when I was with the soldiers after the Solomon battle. “I’ll go fetch it.”
“All right, and then you get back on the double, for I got my eye on you,” he says, assuming the style of a noncom now he had work to do. That’s how it goes with rank, among the whites; I had forgot how quick relations can change.
Soon as I got some men and horses between him and me, I headed for the prisoner’s corral, which I found to be several tepees they had let to stand near the center of the camp, into which the women and children had been collected. I could hear them singing that doleful death dirge of the Cheyenne as I approached. These lodges was of course ringed by a guard of soldiers, and I looked for some difficulty in gaining access there, for I wouldn’t want to tell my purpose in so doing.
In addition I never wanted to get caught again by anybody and put on special duty. My late uneasiness as a white man among Indians was nothing beside the feeling I had now, slogging along in the enormous boots, with only my ears holding up that hat, and the jacket stood away from my body as if it was an empty hogshead.
