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But if I knowed anything at all, it was that Old Lodge Skins and his band had not stayed down in the Nations. I could swear they had went back up to the Powder; either that, or the old man had gone under, for God knows he was old enough, but he wouldn’t tolerate no farming nor do I believe he would stand for little Human Beings learning rot in a white man’s school.

So Custer would be going once again to do to these people what he had done before. I commenced to look at it again as a personal matter. There I was in Yankton, southern Dakota Territory, in May of 1876, and the Far West was getting up steam to negotiate the upper Missouri and go help Custer to slaughter the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne.

I went onto the vessel and to the captain’s cabin, and I says to Marsh that General Custer had telegraphed me to come as a scout for him, owing to my experience in that position at the celebrated Battle of the Washita where we wiped out Black Kettle and his cutthroats; and besides, I was ready to pay the fare.

Marsh says it was all right with him if I could find a place on deck to pitch my bedroll among the supply boxes and barrels lashed there, for the cabins was full up with all manner of persons, military and civilian, and there was even a sutler on board to sell whiskey when they reached the troops.

So the Far West dug its paddlewheel into the muddy water of the Missouri, and we headed north for the biggest Indian battle of them all. You know how a fellow says: but we never realized it at the time. Everybody knowed the tribes was gathering and that Custer would find them. Where we was wrong was in supposing they would run again; or if forced to fight, would lose.

CHAPTER 25 Custer Again

IT TOOK THE BETTER PART of two weeks to reach Fort Abraham Lincoln, up the spring-swollen, bank-crumbling Big Muddy; and when we got there, the troops had been gone for about the same length of time on their direct overland march to the Yellowstone, led by General Terry, with Custer as second in command.

Lincoln wasn’t much of a place, occupying a sweep of treeless flat bottomland overlooked by bluffs from which the hostiles had been spying on the camp; you could see them little piles of stones behind which they’d conceal their heads.

No sooner had the boat tied up at the dock than two women come on board, and one of them was the prettiest female I ever seen in my life with one exception. And well-dressed and gracious, and oh my, what a remarkable sight up there in that barren land with the constant wind blowing across the flats.

It was Mrs. Custer. I recognized her though never having laid eyes on her before, with her winsome round face and beautiful sad eyes and wearing a dinky little velvet bonnet sort of like a derby, and she put her tiny feet on the rough gangplank the deckhands threw down, and walked over it like a bird. Them fellows just stood gawking; it was me who put a hand out at the other end, and she rested hers lightly upon the wrist of it as she stepped to the deck and looked squarely at me and never said thanks, but rather smiled it with small nose and a soft line of pearly teeth. I’ll admit something: I would have killed every Indian on the plains if she had asked me to, or at least if she had been watching. Then she passed me by, for I wasn’t nobody, and was short as her and, as a matter of fact, fair seedy after the time on that boat, where the washing facilities wasn’t of the most improved.

Well sir, what did I do but follow along behind her like a personal servant or an idiot to which somebody done a kind thing, and there was that other woman, too, who was General Custer’s sister and the wife of Lieutenant James Calhoun, though I couldn’t have described her a second later.

Captain Marsh showed them into his cabin, and presumably getting after something on the heel of my boot, I lingered outside the door.

“Captain,” says this whippoorwill voice, “I beg of you to let us come along.”

“Forgive me, ma’am,” Marsh says, “I cannot.”

The same exchange, more or less, was repeated several times, but the captain stayed firm, and I moved away so as to hear no more of her distress. I was full of wonder at this wife of that glorious soldier, with his six hundred troops and his supply boat and Gatling guns. Bad worried she was, you could hear. Now women generally shiver at the thought of Indians, but not, you would think, one who was married to the victor of the Washita. Custer had whipped the Southern Cheyenne, and found gold in the Black Hills. He even survived the enmity of the President of the United States! He was hated by individuals, but was the public’s great favorite, and Mr. James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald had sent along a correspondent to be “in at the kill”—of the Indians, that is. Custer’s wife was as pretty as a woman could get. So what ailed her?