Well, when it sounded like the rear guard had reached the horseshoe bend, I returned to where our camp had been. Before leaving, the army had also pulled down the tepees where the captives was held and put them to the torch. These was still burning. The dead bodies of eight hundred horses lay in the meadow, here and there a hoof still jerking. Owing to the cold, they had not yet gone ripe enough to attract the carrion-feeders, though I seen three coyotes lurking a half mile up the valley and a raven or two high in the cottonwoods. The raw wind of late afternoon lifted black fragments from the refuse pile on the riverbank.
Custer had also shot such dogs as didn’t run with the fleeing Indians, and them little bodies was strewn about amidst spent shells and arrows and the other litter. Considerable blood had spattered upon snow and earth, and when in shadow it froze bright red, soaking in and browning only where in sunlight.
Of the several hundred souls that occupied the place of late, I alone stayed quick. I set down upon the cold bank of the Washita. Though the river had earlier known some blood, them red bursts and filaments never last long in a flowing stream but join the mix and move on, and someplace a thousand miles away a fellow will drink himself some water and unbeknownst imbibe a particle of somebody else’s juice of life. The sun was falling behind a blue ridge of smoke fringed with gold, like a sash hung across the western sky. You might have said that Custer flew his personal colors even on the horizon.
I wasn’t setting there in self-pity, mind you, nor anger. I was just trying to figure it out. Circumstances seemed to disintegrate upon me shortly after I had got settled in them. I was twenty-six years of age, yet as I could recall, this here was the first time I could ever locate the source of my troubles in one individual.
I would have lived in that camp on the Washita throughout the winter, and when the new grass come up in the spring we would have broken the treaty and moved north, got us buffalo and Pawnee en route, and maybe run one of them antelope surrounds again if Old Lodge Skins was up to it and if the railroad hadn’t scared away all the game, and so on up to the Powder River for some good fights with the Crow, and bear hunts and lodgepole-cutting in the Bighorn Mountains. All the while I’d have had them four women tending to my every little wish.
I seen General Custer as responsible for my loss. And I didn’t yet know how nor where I would do it, but I decided to kill that son of a bitch.
CHAPTER 19
WHAT BECOME OF SUNSHINE? If I couldn’t find her body she must have got away; probably waited till the cavalry had swept past the lodge, then slipped out and made it to the bluffs. She was a resourceful and resolute woman, and better than me at that sort of endeavor.
An Indian was more suited in mind and spirit for taking this type of beating than me. Here was I, aiming to kill Custer on the one hand; and on the other, I also decided I could never again live with the Cheyenne, for the simple reason that I couldn’t afford to undergo another massacre on the losing end.
Darkness fell while I was still setting there on the banks of the Washita, plotting murder. It had got monstrous cold, and me covered only with a flannel shirt and cavalry jacket. The troopers had looted every blanket and robe in the village, beyond what they burned, for they had left their overcoats and haversacks back where they started their charge that morning, and the Cheyenne had circled round and got that stuff. Talk of having no weapon—I must first find some protection for my own hide or the weather would do me in before I put a blade in Custer’s.
So I went to what was left of them lodges where the captives had been gathered. Luckily, a little hunk of one tepee skin had not been altogether burned. So I beat out where it was still smoldering and wrapped myself in it. Buffalo hide it was, with the hair scraped off, so afforded none too great a warmth. And not only was it cold in that place, but the moon come out and shone across that field of pony corpses, and now the coyotes had got to them and I also saw the big ghostly shapes of the gray wolf, a nasty creature, and the noise of them fangs tearing at limp flesh and the growls and whines was quite unpleasant.
I just had to start a fire, for the sight of so much carrion gives a wolf the confidence to take on something living. I was scraping among the ashes of the tepees, trying to find a coal still burning, when I heard the sound of horses coming from downriver. Custer had carried out his bluff, you see, threatening the villages in that direction so the Indians would strike them and run without hitting him; then he turned and come back.
