To evade his savage chop I had to go down on the offside of my pony, Indian-style, clinging by my shins, and rode in a circle while he dogged me all along, slashing the air but it made a fearsome snicker. Meanwhile the rest of the cavalry was pounding by, and I expected to be hacked from behind before this son of a bitch either hit me or understood what I was getting at. For he was big, and I don’t care what you say, for every inch a man grows over five foot five, his brain diminishes proportionately. All my life I have had a prejudice against overgrown louts.
This dodging went on long enough and with enough variations so I saw he could never touch me, on the one hand, and would never stop trying, on the other. He wasn’t much of a horseman: at the end of every slash the momentum of his saber-wielding arm would pull up the far knee and loosen his seat while the animal veered. He done this once too often, and I poked my moccasin over into his ribs and with a sudden jolt unhorsed him in a clatter of scabbard and spurs and the rest of that overload the soldier boys toted.
I dropped off my pony, trailing the war bridle from my belt, put a knee into each shoulder of that dazed trooper and laid the edge of my scalping knife across his bristly throat—the blunt side, in case temptation offered.
All of a sudden I recalled a number of choice phrases I had heard from grownups around Evansville.
“Now, you _______,” I says with great energy. “Do I have to cut your _______ throat to get it through your _______ thick head that I’m a _______ white man?”
His dumb look never altered, but he said: “Then why in hell are you dressed like that?”
“It’s a long story,” says I, and let him up.
CHAPTER 8
YOU CAN PROBABLY READ about the fight in books because it was the first real engagement between the Army and the Cheyenne, causing quite a stir at the time. The soldiers claimed thirty Indians was killed in the saber charge, the colonel reported nine, and the truth was four dead, several wounded. It took place in the month of July, 1857.
That’s the kind of thing you find out when you go back to civilization: what date it is and time of day, how many mile from Fort Leavenworth and how much the sutlers is getting for tobacco there, how many beers Flanagan drunk and how many times Hoffmann did it with a harlot. Numbers, numbers, I had forgot how important they was. Kansas had also become a Territory, for all the difference it made to me.
That trooper, whose name was Muldoon, took me to the colonel when the excitement was over, and the way I told it was the Cheyenne had forced me on pain of death to join their war party, after having five years earlier killed my whole family and held me henceforward in brutal imprisonment. Muldoon vouched that I sure could have killed him but refrained from it. With the paint scrubbed completely off, and in a gray wool shirt and blue pants Muldoon lent me from his extras, about eight sizes too big, I appeared pretty harmless.
I didn’t have no need to worry. Regarding Indians you could tell anything in them days and have it swallowed, and sooner by the military than the civil, for the reason that a white soldier keeps up his nerve by believing his enemy is contemptible to the point of buffoonery. Some of them troopers thought Indians ate human flesh, for example, and had relations with their own daughters.
So the colonel expressed his sympathies, then tried to get some information out of me as to the location of the Cheyenne lodges and horse herd, as he proposed to burn the first and capture the second, but I acted as if rendered half idiotic by the tortures I had underwent for years and so eluded that. It turned out he found the camp anyway by merely following the trail, and burned the abandoned tepees. I was happy to see that Old Lodge Skins’s was not among them; Buffalo Wallow Woman and White Cow Woman must have took time to fold it up before fleeing. From there on, that general trail burst into many little ones, as is the Indian practice for evasion. The warriors, who had gone off to the east, would circle around later. Everybody would get together at some later time when the danger was over.
The Army mucked about that area most of the summer, at one point going as far west as Bent’s Fort and seizing the supplies there that was supposed to go as annuity payments to the Indians under the existing treaty, then coming back to the Solomon again. But they never found no more Cheyenne and at length returned to Fort Laramie.
