Then I still never knowed what I intended to do. The Indian camp had not yet been located, Major Reno and his command being out on a reconnaissance mission along the Tongue River at the moment to determine just that. I guess I had some vague plan when the village was found to slip off and get there before the troops and warn the hostiles, though it was too likely I would get killed long before contacting any Cheyenne who might recognize me.
The best move at present seemed to be getting hired as scout, and that required an interview with Custer. General Terry might be in official command, but I got the impression that he did the talking while Custer acted.
I went to the headquarters tent of Son of the Morning Star and bluffed my way past the orderly—a different man from the Washita striker—and walked inside to a little camp table, and there sat the General behind it, a-scribbling as usual. I don’t know that anyone has ever pointed out what a writer Custer was: letters to his wife most every day, and he also done a whole series of articles for the
He did look different with his long hair cropped off like a normal person’s, a little weaker maybe, but then that might have been only the superstition of Bloody Knife. However, I saw something else before he lifted his eyes to me. It was day outside, but he was using a candle as additional illumination, and as he was bent over his papers, the top of his hatless skull lay directly in my sight and there, on either side of a sparse yellow forelock, long spearpoints of pink skin run back almost to meet at the crown.
I felt a touch of human feeling for him on the sudden, which soon left while he made me stand there for quite a time without acknowledgment.
At last he scratches in a full stop on his writing, and he waits for it to dry, lays aside his pen, then stares coldly at me.
“State your business,” he says in that raspy voice I had not forgotten.
“General,” I says, a-trying to keep down the distaste that had again replaced that short-lived other feeling, “I was wondering whether you could use another guide or interpreter. There is Cheyenne out there with the Sioux, and I lived among—”
“No,” he says, and picking up his pen again, called: “Orderly, show this man out.”
That trooper entered the tent and stood aside for me to exit, but I got sore and wouldn’t move and when he took ahold of my arm to assist my departure, I pushed him off and says: “Boy, you touch me again and I’ll lay you open with my pigsticker.”
Custer looked up at that and broke out in a dry laugh with more air in it than sound.
“You’re peppery, aren’t you?” he says. “I like that. All right, orderly, you can retire.” Which the trooper does, glowering at me. Then Custer settles back in his camp chair with a superior smile and says: “Now then, what makes you think you might be useful to me?”
I was still riled, but I managed to mention some of my experiences with the Cheyenne while of course omitting everything about the Washita.
“Oh, Cheyenne,” he broke in before I had got much out, “but not Sioux? Well, my good fellow, you are eight years late. As you may have heard, I trounced the Cheyenne in 1868 down in Indian Territory. You apparently do not keep up with things.”
I tell you, it was his grin that burned me more than the substance of his comments, but I knowed that if I really let my temper go, I’d kill him.
So I says, level as I could: “There’s still enough Cheyenne north of the Platte to give you a run for your money, especially if they have joined with the Lakota.”
“Oh,” says he, “a few stragglers, perhaps, have made their way north to join these malcontents, but I can whip the whole lot with one troop of the Seventh—unless the Indian agents have managed to equip them with the latest Winchester repeating arms, in which case I shall need two troops. In my opinion, a better campaign might be waged against the latter gentry, the scoundrels who, on the one hand, speculate in the Indian annuities and, on the other, excuse and prevaricate about the depredations of the savages under their protection.”
On this subject he become genuinely exercised, frowning beneath them heavy pale brows and nose getting real pointy. “I find it quite sinister,” he says, “that these men can connive—for that is what it amounts to—in the atrocities against their own countrymen. For example, the official at the Red Cloud Agency has been so lax with his barbarous charges that they lately, with murderous threats, frustrated his attempt to raise the American flag above his office!”
Then he caught himself, as if realizing it was not proper form for a brevet major-general of the U.S. Army to address a common frontiersman with high emotion.
