“How’s the General?” I says. Now I must explain that the type of fellow who takes that job has got the personality to suit it. He helps his master dress, serves his master’s food, and digs his master’s latrine, and for all I know wipes his master’s behind. But sucking up to one man satisfies his appetite, and to all others he is extra-snotty.
“Don’t you worry about that,” says he. “Just give me two of them middle-sized logs.”
“I was thinking he must be plumb wore out.”
He give a sneering laugh. “You will never see the time when the General can’t run any man in this outfit into the ground. He only went into camp now on account of the likes of you. He don’t need no sleep nor food. Whipping one tribe of Indians only gives him the taste for another.”
I says: “I seen he was writing something.”
“Yes,” says the striker. “That would be a letter to his Lady. He writes her most every day.” There wasn’t no postal boxes on the plains at that time, so when Custer mailed them letters he had to send some scout through a couple hundred mile of savage wilderness. I had yet to hear a thing about that man that didn’t gall me like a cactus burr.
But just about the time I thought I had got this worm’s confidence, he suddenly stops and squints suspiciously.
“Say, have you got an eye on my job?”
“Not me,” I hastens to say. “No sir, I admit I am too dumb for it. But I tell you, I am right fascinated by heroes. I guess that’s because I am kind of yellow myself. I near pissed my pants on that charge this morning, and the only thing that kept me going was the sight of the General up there ahead, his hair streaming in the wind and his arm waving us on.” I put this watery, worshipful look on my face, and he swallowed it.
“Well,” he says, “you want to carry this wood for me? I reckon it’s O.K. if you come along to the bottom of the hill, where you can look up at him. And that’s a favor I wouldn’t give to any of the rest of these scum.”
“Listen,” says I, gritting my teeth with another feeling than that which he took it for, “it’s worth a month’s pay to me to actually go on up and put the wood on the fire near that noble individual.”
He was first scandalized at this suggestion, but after a good bit of talk and my signing an IOU, with a false name, to hand him over thirteen dollars at the next payday, which is what a private earned per month, I gained the privilege of carrying the wood alone to the top of the hill, sticking it into the fire, and coming immediately back thereafter.
We set out for the knoll, and upon reaching the bottom of it, he stayed there and I mounted the slope with my two logs. Them griping soldiers had been wrong: Custer wasn’t wearing no overcoat, and he had even laid his hat beside him and loosened the top of his shirt. Of course he was right close to the warm fire. His hair and mustache was golden in the light. He never looked up from the paper, supported upon an order book, which he was covering with line after line of fluent script, occasionally dipping his pen into a little ink bottle, then flinging the excess drops hissing into the flames.
I poked a log into the embers, with my back towards the striker at the foot of the slope, so he wouldn’t see my other hand go beneath the jacket to the hilt of my knife. Some sparks went up the pink smoke stream towards the open black heavens. Custer did not raise his head, for to do so he would have had to change the angle at which his noble profile took the light. He was posing here quite as much as he had done when striding about the Cheyenne camp that morning. Then he was “General in the Field”; now, “Soldier at the End of Day.”
It’s funny how a man with Custer’s personality could influence that of his would-be murderer, but I was seeing myself in various illustrations: knife raised over unsuspecting general, him with his halo of golden locks, me with teeth bared, and so on through a series that ended with “Assassin at Bay.”
Who knows how much time I wasted on them childish visions. If you set out to kill, leave your imagination at home. Reality should suffice, at least if you’re white.
For what happened now was that Custer spoke.
Still scratching away with his nib, his eyes to the paper, he says: “I’ll take a cup of coffee now.”
Maybe I simply lost my guts at that moment; maybe I never did have the stomach to slaughter a man in cold blood, but what I have always thought to be the case was that the
So the assassin answers slavishly: “Yes, sir,” and goes down the knoll to where that striker is waiting.
“Get up there on the double,” I says. “The General wants you to give him a bath.”
