“Oh, hell,” I says aloud in English. “What does it matter? Drink up, you poor son of a bitch.”
He shortly passed out, and I took the precaution of unloading his rifle, in case he woke up before the effects had worn off.
I had learned what I wanted to know. I reckoned, in view of Custer’s current needs, this upcoming battle would make the Washita look cheap. Bloody Knife’s pessimism did not impress me. I didn’t care how many hostiles had collected, I knowed they wasn’t organized, never had much modern armament, and was living with their wives and kids.
Well, what was I going to do about it? That old childish idea of assassinating Custer was obviously out. Such a stunt, pulled off now, would just make the Seventh fight harder. They all hated his guts—no sooner had I got off the
Now I had left Bloody Knife under the sagebush when, walking back to camp a-studying this matter, who should I spot but a figure out of the distant past, sitting on the bank just beyond where the Powder emptied into the Yellowstone.
His skin was darker yet than a Ree’s and he wore a flop hat with an eagle feather in it. By God if he had changed much in twenty year.
I says to him: “Well, Lavender, this is some surprise.”
For that is who it was, and he looked at me right polite and says I had the advantage on him.
“Jack Crabb,” says I. “The Reverend Pendrake, in ______, Missouri.”
He studies me careful and says: “Go on.” Then he takes off his hat so he can see better, stands up, peers into my face, kind of groans, then laughs, and I grabs him and gives him a bear hug. I don’t know why, it was more like finding a long-lost relative than when I had actually done so on several occasions.
After we got through with exchanging the pleasures of re-meeting, I says: “Tell me what you’re doing here. Has the Reverend become a chaplain?”
“No, not him,” says Lavender, who must now have been around forty-five years of age and had a few gray hairs when I looked him over close, but the mahogany skin of his face was still unlined. He was dressed in buckskin jacket and pants with fringe, and if I wasn’t wrong, his belt showed beadwork in the Sioux fashion. “No,” he says again, and then: “My oh my, I ain’t thought on that Reverend for many a year. He died, Jack, not long after you run off. Et himself to death, is what happened. He packed away one of them gigantic dinners that Lucy made for him one noontime, then took a nap directly after, and some of that meal backed up and clogged his windpipe and he suffocated afore anyone knowed the difference, damn if he did not.”
At that minute Lavender got a bite on his fishline, for he had set down again and lifted his pole, with me alongside, and he pulled it out and there was a real nice fish on the hook, which he unfastened and tossed flopping on the bank.
“Well,” Lavender goes on, “the way I looked at it at the time, that man died happy, in the condition he liked best in all the world: stuffed with victual. I believe Lucy had cooked roast pork with applesauce that day.”
I suffered something between indigestion and heart flutter as I asked: “And Mrs. Pendrake? I reckon she got married again?”
Lavender was threading another earthworm on his hook. “The Lady,” he says, “no, the Lady closed up the shutters on that house and I recall never even attended the funeral. And the church got it a new preacher who was supposed to live in that house, but she never moved out and none of them white folks had nerve to ask her to do it, so the new one, he had to reside somewhere else, and as far as I know she is there yet.”
I was thinking my own thoughts: even for a minute the impulse run through my head to pack up whatever I was doing here and head back down to Missouri instanter, but I was old enough by now to accept the better sense. I was thirty-six and had been through too much. Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain’t done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.
