Wolves, coyotes, and me melted away. I don’t know where the vermin went: I retired into the brush, and more listened to than watched the column troop through the razed village. Then, after the rear guard had passed, I fell in a quarter-mile behind and followed them at this interval some hours up the valley of the Washita to where they finally made camp. Oh, but it was a cold and barren march for me, the desolation adding to the temperature. My only solace was that them troops dwelt in a similar predicament as to the weather. But they had comrades in misery, whereas my recent partners was dead or dispersed.
Soon they lighted great bonfires which illuminated the riverbottom. Well, I could just as soon cut Custer’s throat after I singed my shanks a little, I thought. Indeed, without so doing it wasn’t likely I could lift my knife for the shivering. So I snuck through the picket line and pushed up close through the throng about one blaze.
Some soldier wrapped in an Indian blanket says: “You ain’t got a chaw?” I shook my head. The reflection of the flames flickered in his blear-eyes. He says: “Wasn’t that a brilliant idea of Hard Ass’s to leave the packs and overcoats behind? I reckon he’ll get another medal for that.”
A fellow on my other side says: “I don’t doubt he kept his own overcoat and a side of bacon which his striker is frying up at this minute.”
“Custer’s luck, hey boys?” This come from the blear-eyed fellow, and someone else said hush or Hard Ass would hear him.
“Screw him,” says Blear Eyes. “What’s he gonna do, put me on half rations?”
The other soldier says: “He’ll have a hole dug right through the snow and throw you in it, boy.”
“He will?” I asks, trying to seem a natural part of this group.
“Will he? You must be a recruit or you’d know he done the very thing on the campaign a year ago last summer. Ask Gilbert,” nodding at a long, thin soldier with a crooked nose and a growth of whiskers who was rubbing his skinny hands towards the fire. This man says: “Yeah, we was in the field and he never had no guardhouse. Some of us boys showed up late for call, so he had this hole dug in the ground, thirty foot square, maybe fifteen deep, and throwed us in, then put boards acrost it. Fierce hot it was under the sun, and there was too many of us to lay down all at once.”
“Then Hard Ass himself goes over the hill to see his old lady,” Blear Eyes says. “Runs right off an Indian campaign. And you know all that happened to him? Suspended from command for one year, and he goes back to Michigan and spends it fishing.”
Gilbert says: “I don’t condemn the bastard for running back to his woman, much as I hate him, for there’s a pretty piece of fluff.”
“That right?” says I. I was fair warmed now and beginning to plot my course.
“Oh my yes. You ain’t never seen Miz Custer? I tell you when you do you’ll howl and lay down and lick the dirt, boy, and go to bed next night with Rosy Palm and her five sisters. That’s the difference between a general and a private. Hey, who’s for going over to the prisoners and getting us an old squaw?”
The conversation degenerated from that point on, as you might expect if you know anything about an army, and I edged off and proceeded across the campground. If I was going to assassinate Custer, I first had to locate him without arousing suspicion, which was not easy, since six or seven hundred soldiers was present and I was not tall enough to see over anybody’s head.
The Cheyenne captives had an area and a couple small fires to themselves, and they was now so many silent blanket-rolls upon the earth, the children wrapped right in with their mothers: nothing keeps a redskin from his sleep. Down a ways beyond that, their ponies was herded, with a wide separation between them and the cavalry horses, who the Indian animals make nervous.
I made quite a scout of that bivouac, which was spread out and well lighted by the enormous cottonwood fires; and with the men cold and tired and hungry, what a slaughter could have been managed by fifty Indians. But the tribe had been whipped and then tricked, and anyway they never fought at night. Custer could just as well have pulled in his guards. Only one active enemy lurked in that area.
That was me, and by a process of elimination I found him at last. The officers had their fire at the base of a little knoll, but the General wasn’t there, he was by himself on top of the slight eminence. He had his own little blaze, and was seated on the ground alongside it, writing by its yellow light. Occasionally his striker, that is the orderly who done his servant-work, would come up and put a new log on the flames, which he had got from a detail of poor devils who was kept cutting wood in the timber all night and hauling it into camp.
So on one of their trips in with a load, I joined these last and helped them stack logs, which they did not question, and watched for Custer’s striker to come over for a supply, which he finally done just before my back was broke.
