The Widow Walsh then said: “Ah, go on, then. I ain’t stopping them,” and turned away, the rest of the women with her. They had lost their men and been raped and were stranded in the wilderness, and there was no way back but that by which they had been months in coming, so they could hardly be much moved by what happened to one girl.
Old Lodge Skins was impassively sitting his horse, watching us through droopy eyelids. On the wooden saddle hung his shield, round, made of hide, and adorned with ten black scalps. In place of the blown-up musket he now carried a lance from the shaft of which dangled a couple more hanks of hair. He wasn’t a bad-looking dog, or hadn’t been in his youth, anyway, whenever that was; his braids now were shot with gray and the muscles of his limbs were stringy. It is hard to tell an Indian’s age, but he must have been within smelling distance of seventy. He grew a big nose with a long, hooking sweep to it, and the ends of his mouth had slight upward twists, whereas his eyes was sad. He generally wore a sort of good-natured melancholy as to expression. You couldn’t say he looked dangerous in any wise; indeed, it was rather Caroline who seemed savage at this juncture.
She had been a tomboy but was getting on in years, and the men never took to her back in Evansville except as a pal. She had got a crush on the local blacksmith, a widower of forty, and hung around the forge, but as far as he went was to let her hold a horse’s hoof while he shoed it. Then there was some farmer’s son: I think for a time they spread manure together, forked hay, and the like. Not even them drummers who came and went, of whom it was said they would screw a snake if somebody’d hold its head, paid her attention as a woman. White men had never done much good for her, you see, and now Pa and the others with the wagons had got themselves killed.
I mention this to explain Caroline’s peculiar manner at that time. I think she was also humiliated at not having been raped.
“Well, Caroline,” said Ma, standing there in her long, washed-out dress and sunbonnet; she looked like one of them little dolls you can make out of a hollyhock blossom with a bud for its head. My Ma was small, not far over five feet, and I reckon my lifelong shortness is due to hers. “Well, Caroline, I expect we will have to go back to Laramie. I’ll tell the soldiers and they’ll come to fetch you.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” replied Caroline. “Indins know all about how to hide their tracks.”
“Well, then,” Ma said, “you must drop a button now and again, or a piece of your shirt, to lay a trail.”
Caroline impatiently scraped the sweat from her forehead and wiped the hand on the butt of her jeans. She believed, I think, that Ma was trying to diminish her danger and self-concocted glory, and the direct result of that was the cooking of my goose.
“Maybe they won’t hurt me permanently,” said Caroline. “Maybe they’ll hold me for ransom. I don’t expect to be murdered, or why would they want Jack to come along, too?”
That awful whimper, I discovered after a bit, was issuing from my own throat. Hearing my name had set it off.
To her credit my Ma went up to Old Lodge Skins’s horse and begged him not to take me, on account of I was her youngest and only ten years old and skinny. He nodded with sympathy, but when she was done he beckoned to his followers, who rode in and tied all eight horses to our wagon as if the deal had been closed. Even then the subsequent events might have failed to transpire had not the Cheyenne hung around for a bit in the hopes they would get a cup of coffee! Indians simply never understood whites and vice versa.
“Bill will take one of the ponies and ride back for the soldiers fast as he can go,” Ma said, giving me a great hug. “Don’t think bad of your Pa, Jack. He done the best he could, given his vision. Maybe by taking you and Caroline, the Indians are trying after their own fashion to make up for what they done yesterday. I don’t think they’re bad people, Jack, or they wouldn’t have brung the horses.”
There you had it. Nobody thought to ask Caroline how she knew what the Cheyenne were up to without speaking their language. There was a time when I suspected my Ma actually wanted to get rid of us, because the soldiers never came; which was before I found out, some years on, that Bill rode back to Laramie, sold the horse, got a job with the traders, and not only never reported about us to the Army but also never rejoined the wagons. No, my Ma was well-meaning but ignorant. My Pa was crazy and my brother was a traitor. Then there was Caroline. They weren’t much of a family, I guess, but then I was not with them long.
Ma give us each a kiss, and Caroline mounted one of the ponies brought by the Indians, pulling me up behind. The other kids waved in silence, Bill with a dirty, scared grin. Old Lodge Skins, dawdling about nearby on his horse, grunted quizzically and covered his lips. I didn’t know then that this is how Indians show astonishment-their mouth falls open and they cover it so their soul can’t jump out and run away.
He thereupon gave evidence of wanting to make another speech, but Caroline motioned him to come on, dug her heels into the mount, which was skittish owing to its unfamiliarity with white hindquarters, and we went off like a cannon shot, heading north.
At top of the rise, she pulled in on the rawhide bridle and waited for the three Cheyenne, who weren’t in no hurry, I’ll say that for them. Then we rode on down to the river, which was yellow and swollen from the spring rains, and swam the ponies across, I holding onto the tail of ours and spinning behind like a lure on a fishline.
CHAPTER 2 Boiled Dog
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the river, Caroline fetched me up on the pony’s rump again, and said in a new sappy, romantic way that would have been pathetic were I not numb from fear and now swamped with the muddy water of the Platte: “Maybe, Jack, I’m going to be an Indin princess in feathers and beads.”
I never had rode horse much before, and already it was beginning to get me in the crotch and hams from jolting up and slamming down at every stride; and if I dug my heels into the beast’s yellow haunches, he would blow out his belly and try to shiver his arse out from under mine. I had not made a friend in that animal, which was a pity being as he was my sole means of support in a vast and alien land populated by savages.
One of the latter came up alongside us at that moment, namely Old Lodge Skins himself, whom the river crossing had changed as to personality. I later found he had a special feeling about the Platte, regarding it as the southern boundary of his territory and when on the other side felt foolish and irresponsible, whereas when north of it came back to normal, whatever that was. Anyway, once he rode in out of the water, he gave us a stern look from under his hat, pointed back over a bony shoulder protruding from his blanket, as if to say “Get behind,” and trotted his animal up the bank.
We followed, our horse making the bluff in a couple of tries owing to his double load-not that I was that much extra weight, but rather because he never lost an opportunity to let me know I was an imposition.
Now when Indians travel, they go every which way according to their personal taste. Them two braves who had come with the chief didn’t cross at the same place as us. One rode down a hundred yards and swum his pony over, and the other went upstream for about a mile, then the river took a bend and he went around it out of sight. I guess he knew a better place. We didn’t see him again for an hour, until we come over a rise, and there he sat on the earth, his mount grazing nearby. Old Lodge Skins passed him without so much as a look, and the brave returned the compliment. The latter started singing, though, in an awful moaning fashion that we could hear for a long time thereafter, when so far off he looked like a tiny bush.