We hadn’t got far when our scouts come back with the report of a column of troops about half a day’s ride ahead, moving our way. Now at the big camp they had had a few flintlocks, so about three of our warriors was now armed in this fashion, and Hump, who had been waiting for years for this eventuality, wanted to ride on and fight the soldiers. But Old Lodge Skins and the head chiefs of the Burnt Arteries was concerned for the women and children, so we turned and went back south in search of our other folks. Traveling east, we caught up with some of the southern people and reassembled with them again near the Solomon’s Fork. It wasn’t the whole crowd from before, but we had maybe three hundred fighting men and say ten or fifteen flintlocks which seemed to the Cheyenne pretty formidable armament.
The excitement was so great I didn’t have no time to work out my new point of view: I had already decided theoretically, as I said, that the utter annihilation of the paleface on the western prairie wasn’t no skin off my arse: I didn’t know a white man west of St. Joe except for the remnants of my own family who by now must long have reached Salt Lake. But when I studied that out, I never actually saw myself participating in such a massacre. Now here was a battle coming up with the U.S. Cavalry and I was passing for a Cheyenne warrior of some repute. I had the choice of being a coward or either kind of traitor. I remember wishing we was still fighting the Crow.
It sure was a serious problem, but all the time I considered it I was stripping down, daubing myself with red and yellow war paint, and honing the heads of my arrows on a little whetstone. There are some who in moments of indecision cease all bodily movement so as to give free play to the mind, but I’m the other type: I give employment to my hands, figuring my brain will follow suit. When this don’t work, there ain’t no reason to believe I’d have got any farther by sitting with my chin on my knuckles.
We sent the women and children off south below the Arkansas, although owing to the confidence the Cheyenne had at this moment they set up the lodges again and left them standing. Then Ice themedicine man led us to a little lake nearby, in which we made ourselves invulnerable by dipping our hands in the water. When the soldiers fired we’d just put up our palms and the balls would barely clear the muzzles and dribble to the ground.
That was when the whole business cleared up for me: I was going to die.
You can go so far with Indians and then that sort of thing comes up. I know the medicine of Left-Handed Wolf had cured me of my head wound, but I believe that happened because I was unconscious during most of the healing, and when you are out of your right mind there don’t seem to be any rules as to what is possible. Dead drunk, a man can take a fall that when sober would mash him like a tomato. I don’t want to be no bigot: I’m not saying that under no conditions can a rifle ball be stopped by magic. What I’m saying is that it ain’t going to be stopped by someone who don’t believe it can be done as applied to himself. Which was me. So far as Hump went, or Burns Red in the Sun, or Younger Bear, that was their lookout.
If you been listening close you might have caught me up back a ways in the part about fighting the Crow. That first one I killed had found I was white even in the dark: what about those we rode against in the daytime? I painted my face and body, but how about my red hair? I’ll tell you. After all the enthusiasm over my first exploit, I certainly didn’t want to mention the peculiar conditions of it to any of the Human Beings, for that Crow’s discovery of my race, his friendly ways, etc., would only have confused them to hear about. But when we rode out in war, I had represented my problem to Old Lodge Skins in this style:
“Grandfather,” I said, which is how you address a man of his age, “I want to do something and don’t know the proper way. I don’t want the Crow to see the color of my head, and yet I don’t want them to think I have been such a coward as to cut off my hair so I can’t be scalped. I am still too young and have taken too few coups to wear a full war bonnet.”
The chief thought this over, and then he took his plug hat and put it on my head. It was a bit big and came down to my ears, but all the better for coverage.
“Whenever you fight, you may wear this,” he said, “but give it back between times because it goes with that medal the Father sent to me from the main village of the whites.”
And that’s what I did, stuffing a little padding inside the band so it’d be snugger and tying it to my chin with a rawhide cord. As to the hair on my nape, I’d run the paint up to cover that. I still didn’t have no braids, of course, and the Crow probably didn’t take me for a 100 per cent Cheyenne, for Indians have sharp eyes even in the press of war, but I could have been a breed.
