I had of course been with them this while, being looked after by Muldoon, who found it convenient to forget I could have killed him with my hands tied behind me and pretend I was a helpless kid. Well, I let him, for he was a kindly slob. He used to make me wash a lot with strong Army soap, claiming I still stunk like a goat for weeks after I had left the Cheyenne. I believed
The other soldiers treated me the same, and other than having to listen to a lot of their stupid talk, I never actually suffered. On a campaign like that was an easier way to break back into white life than any other. At least we was outdoors and slept on the ground, and though that Army grub, chiefly sowbelly and hardtack, was garbage, I shot some game now and again, for I had retained my bow and arrow and my Cheyenne pony, and the soldiers liked red meat too, so that made me quite popular with them though I never talked much, which they laid to my weak-mindedness owing to years of captivity.
You might have thought the colonel would be interested in my experiences of five years’ barbarism, but he wasn’t. I wasn’t long in discovering that it is a rare person in the white world who wants to hear what the other fellow says, all the more so when the other fellow really knows what he is talking about.
I’ll say this, my medicine failed when we got to Laramie. I had not had anything in mind when I went white at the Solomon battle, except to save my life while not retreating. I sure didn’t figure out what such a decision would entail in the long run. I was away from civilization so many years that I forgot how everything is organized there: you don’t just move into someone’s tepee and let it go at that.
For example, we hadn’t been long at Laramie, where I was still bunking with the soldiers, when the colonel sent for me.
“The records in this department are far from adequate,” says he. “The unfortunate incident in which the red fiends assaulted your father’s wagons has never been entered, so far as we can determine from our files. I’m afraid punishment of the particular malefactors will be rather difficult owing to the insufficient information you have so far provided as to their identity—this of course added to the problem of laying our hands on the Indians concerned were they even to be clearly identified.
“For as you know they are a wily lot. Eventually, I suppose, we will be forced to kill them all off—I can see no other possibility in the face of their savage obduracy against setting aside the life of the brute.
“So much for those unhappy memories. The important thing is the life that opens before you,” and so on, the upshot of which was he sent me east to Fort Leavenworth, the departmental headquarters, with a column that was going there the next day. Leavenworth was on the Missouri River, right near Westport, what was later named Kansas City, and Independence, where my Pa bought his wagon and team of ox. This was civilization, or what passed for it in them days, in the extreme.
I got a choking, sensation when I heard the news. There was already so many white men around Laramie you could hardly breathe, and I didn’t sleep well in them rectangular barracks, on account of having been trained by the Cheyenne to favor the circular dwelling. I think I have mentioned their feeling about circles, the circle of the earth and so on. They was set against the ninety-degree angle, which brought continuity to a dead stop. Old Lodge Skins used to say: “There’s no power in a square.”
Now I was going back to a whole world of sharp corners, while somewhere out on the prairie the Human Beings had collected again, and having keened for their dead, was eating roast hump and dreaming and telling stories by the buffalo-chip fire and stealing ponies from the Pawnee and getting theirs stole in return, and Nothing was there in her fringed dress of white antelope.
They knew about where I was, although they might not have been told, the way they knew about everything that concerned their people and nothing else. They wouldn’t have heard of or understood the slavery troubles, John Brown and all that was going on in white Kansas at the time.
