Yet right now I was annoyed, and says: “Well, if you are busy-” and starts to leave, but his eyes cleared and he says: “Come on and set.” So I did and we exchanged that Sioux pipe now and again, and at length I says: “I guess it wouldn’t do no good for us to run off.”

“No,” he says, “no, it would not.”

I blew out some spicy smoke. He had got the real Indian mix somewhere, maybe from the Ree scouts.

“Look, Lavender,” I says. “I asked you once and you never really answered: Why did you come on this campaign?”

He says: “I wanted to see this country again before I die.”

I appreciated what he meant, though not everybody would have when they saw the cactus and sage and bullberry bushes, along with a few cottonwoods and box elders, which constituted the growth of that district, and the ravines and cutbanks of the terrain.

“Say,” I asks, “did you ever find any descendants of that kin of yours who went with Lewis and Clark?”

“Not a one,” Lavender says, “that I could verify, though some Sioux is right dark of skin. But I didn’t look much, for the thing is, when you join the Indians, you got all the relatives you need. There might be people in the band what ain’t overly fond of one another, but they save their real spite for the enemy.”

Lavender had throwed back the blanket when I set with him, though that bush was still arched over us, and a tribe of mosquitoes was also sharing the wickiup. I had took several bites already.

“It is otherwise with this here bunch,” I says.

“Oh my yes,” says Lavender. “The way they hate General Custer, and they ain’t nobody thinks well of Major Reno, who was slapped once in the face by Captain Benteen at the officer club at Lincoln. And Captain Benteen wrote the newspapers a bad letter on what happened at the Washita. And General Custer was a-fixing to horsewhip him for it, but the Captain put his hand onto his pistol and he say: ‘Come ahead,’ but the General decided not to.”

Lavender shook his head. “I’ll tell you this about Captain Benteen. Did you ever know he come from a Southern family what was Rebel in the War and called him a traitor when he joined the Union Army? His old Daddy put a curse upon his head, hoping he’d be killed. So the Captain worked it that his Daddy was arrested and throwed into a Federal prison till the War was over. Think of it!”

“The Cheyenne killed my Pa, but took me for a son.” I don’t know why I said that.

“I never knowed my Daddy,” says Lavender. “My master sold him to another before I was born.”

Then I got to telling him about Olga and Gus on the one hand, and Sunshine and Morning Star on the other, and as long as I had started, related the rest of it, Denver and Wild Bill and Amelia and, yes, the Washita.

“Well,” says Lavender when I had finished, “I never knowed being white was so complicated.”

“I don’t reckon it is for everybody,” I allowed. “Take General Custer. He not only knows who his family is, but he takes most of them along when he goes to war.”

“That’s right,” Lavender says, and he looks uneasy.

I says: “You like him don’t you.”

His pipe had went out and he scraped the ash from it and took his time. Finally he says: “He has always treated me well, Jack. That’s all I got to go on. You got to remember he is a soldier.”

“Good at killing,” I says.

“And dying, if it comes to that,” says Lavender. He puts the pipe away into a buckskin bag, then says: “I wonder if you would write out a will for me.”

So I went through the twilit bivouac and the soldiers lounging about digesting their suppers, and now the fires was all extinguished for a flame can be seen many miles after dark, and I had to ask quite a few before I found a man who could lend me a pencil and even then he never had no paper except a letter from his wife which he carried for good luck in a pocket over his heart, so I saw two officers a-coming through the gloom and purposed to beg a blank page from the order books they generally carried.

They was Lieutenants McIntosh, Wallace, and Godfrey. I found out later from Botts that Custer had held a staff meeting that night, in total distinction to his usual practice of keeping his own counsel. He explained why he never took the Gatling guns and cavalry reinforcements, on the ground that the Gatlings being hard to transport would detain the column, and as to the other horsemen, he figured they would cause more jealousy between outfits than give help against the foe. Then he talked some more about the campaign and asked for suggestions from the officers.

Now this was an unprecedented thing for Custer to do. He had always told, in that raspy voice of his, and never asked. Bottsy says he had heard the General sounded almost pleading. “That mean son of a bitch. I wonder why.”

Anyway, this will make some sense of what I heard them officers say, as I remembered it later.

“Godfrey,” says Wallace, “I believe Custer is going to be killed.”

Lieutenant Godfrey asks: “What makes you think so?”

“Because I have never heard him talk in that way before.”

Mcintosh just looked from one to the other and didn’t utter a sound. He was a breed, his Ma being an Iroquois Indian back East, and was noted for his slow-moving, cautious ways. He was the only member of this trio who was himself soon to die. He must sometimes have had interesting thoughts.

Well, hearing that, I did not ask them officers for paper, but waited awhile and along came Captain Keogh by himself, with his big black mustache and little pointy underlip beard, so I put my request to him.

Keogh was an Irishman what had served in the personal guard of the Pope in Rome before coming to the U.S.A.

“Ah, sure,” he says, “go and tell Finnegan to give you a sheet from my writing case.”

Finnegan was his striker, who according to Botts kept all of Keogh’s money when they was at Fort Lincoln, lest the Captain drink himself to death on it. “Finnegan’s more like his guardian than striker,” Botts said.

I thanked him and started away, when Keogh put an odd question.

“Would you be writing your will?” he says.

“How’d you know that?”

He give a merry laugh, which was odd considering what he said then: “I made me own last night. But that was after Tom Custer and Calhoun took me at poker, so I don’t have much to leave behind.”

“Why then did you make it?” I asked humorlessly, for I was still under the influence of Lavender and them lieutenants.

“For the sheer hell of it,” says Captain Keogh, and his eyes was bright even in the dusk.

So I searched out Finnegan and got the paper and come back to Lavender, and him and me made out our wills, leaving such as we had to each other, and then the problem arose as to who should keep it, since we’d both be going into whatever fight occurred.

“Give it to Bloody Knife,” says Lavender. “Roll it up and stick it in a cartridge case and give it to him to keep.”

“Why,” I says, “he’ll be in the fight too, won’t he?”

“Not him,” says Lavender. “He’s a coward, like all Ree. At the first shot, he’ll turn and won’t stop till he sees the Missouri River.”

That just goes to show you there ain’t no race that has a monopoly on truth. In point of fact, Bloody Knife got shot in the head in the valley and his brains was blown all over Major Reno. However, that didn’t matter so far as our wills went, for I burned that paper. To have such a document in existence seemed bad medicine to me. I wasn’t the devil-may-care type of Captain Keogh, and maybe that’s why I didn’t get killed like he did.

Next day we marched thirty mile up the Rosebud, and within the first five we hit that Indian trail which Reno had found on his scout. Now I was still at the rear with them goddam mules, which was so slow that the main column would get miles on ahead, so when I seen the Indian trail, it had been overmarked in part by the iron shoes of the cavalry horses, but it was clear indeed that four-five thousand Lakota had made it, for it was. no less than three hundred yards wide and the abandoned campsites along it showed the circles from a thousand tepees, not to mention countless wickiups.