It was partly on account of the promise I made in that note, but mostly because for all the things I done in my life, some of them fairly unrespectable, I never got so low as to speak ill of a lady in public. At least not so’s you could recognize her. The type of fellow who would do that should be shot.

CHAPTER 12 Going for Gold

WHAT I HAD IN MIND on leaving the Pendrakes was of course returning to the Cheyenne. God knows I thought enough about it and kept telling myself I was basically an Indian, just as when among Indians I kept seeing how I was really white to the core.

But when I got to the river’s edge that early morning of my departure, where I figured to take a boat across to the western shore and hit the emigrant trail, I suddenly lost my taste for that venture. I just couldn’t see myself going back to a buffalo robe in Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. I couldn’t stand it at the Pendrakes’ no more, but the answer to my problem didn’t seem to be returning to savagery after that nine or ten months out of it. Being primitive ain’t the easiest thing in the world to get used to if you know better. You get showed a more regular manner of obtaining your grub, for example, and it’s pretty hard to return to a method that ain’t guaranteed.

I reckon that was one consideration that changed my mind. I was too ignorant to reflect that I ate on schedule with the Pendrakes because I didn’t have to provide the food myself. Then another thing was that in our town you heard a lot about St. Louie, and I figured so long as I was in the same state I ought to see that great city. I could always go west, and I oughtn’t pass up a chance to take in the local sights while I was here.

So I went east to St. Louie, walking most of the route so as to save my money, which nevertheless had dwindled out by the time I reached the city and the rest of it went for my first meal there, for which they took fifty cents off me, prices being criminal high in St. Louie.

I ain’t going into detail how I survived there, but it was barely. I sold my clothes, I cleaned outhouses, I begged, and I stole. Within a month after I stopped being Mrs. Pendrake’s pampered son, I was a dirty old bum sleeping in the back of stables.

Don’t ask me about the theatrical exhibitions they had in St. Louie or the fine stores or the great eating places or the luxurious boats that plied the Mississippi River, for my knowledge of them extended no further than the outside, where I’d stand as a ragged beggar, collecting very little, until rousted by the police constables.

But St. Louie was quite a center for the trade going west, and in time I had a bit of luck: got myself hired on as guide for a mule train of yardgoods and such heading for Santa Fe in New Mexico. Which took some lying, though of course I could back it up with my fluent Cheyenne. I had never been to Santa Fe, but I found out that from years of travel the trail was plainly marked, so figured to have no trouble in guiding along it. Anyway, them fellows what owned the train was dumb as hell and not hard to convince of anything unlikely. They hadn’t never been west of St. Joe, but had raised all the money they could for this expedition, on which they expected to make a pile in one shot out of what they believed to be a bunch of stupid greasers. Their names was the Wilkerson Brothers.

What happened to change their plans was that the Comanche jumped us, killed both Wilkersons along with all the mule skinners, and stole the goods and burned the wagons. This disaster occurred along the Cimarron River after we had crossed the fifty mile of waterless plain from the Arkansas.

You notice I wasn’t myself killed in this set-to. In fact, I wasn’t even wounded. I just knowed how to handle myself, and when everybody else was down, didn’t see no further reason to keep standing off fifty savages when all I had to do it with was one old muzzle-loader.

Well, there I was, within a barricade of cases of our trade goods, and the circle of screeching Comanche was drawing tighter, and you fire once from a muzzle-loader and then spend the next fifteen minutes recharging it: if you’re faced with more than three of the enemy, they could almost have beat you to death with their hands before you found your ramrod. So I was forced to employ that weapon I carried on top of my neck. I remembered that invaluable story of Little Man again!

Down behind the barricade, I quick stripped off my shirt, made a ball of it about the size of my head, and jammed my felt hat onto it, with the brim down low, which is the way a man would wear it in the bright sun along the Cimarron. I had a jacket, too, and got back into it, pulling in my neck like a turtle and buttoning the garment right up over my head. The arms hung loose, with my own inside, and I slipped one hand up and held that shirt-head, wearing the hat, onto the jacket neck.

Up I rose, about six feet five to the crown of the hat, looking out of a peephole between the top jacket buttons, and started to walk towards the galloping ring of Snake People. All I had to rely on was their knowing the legend of Little Man the Great Cheyenne. And you can be sure that before they made up their minds, they kept firing arrows at me for a spell and one went through the limp arm of my jacket.

But directly they begun to slow down to a trot, then to a walk, still encircling but fascinated. Well sir, here goes, I thought; I’m going to shoot my wad. At that point I had passed the body of one of the Wilkersons, looking blank towards the sky and with two arrows in his chest. I pitched that fake head right off my fake shoulders. It hit the ground and rolled, but I had balled it tight and the hat never come off.

The Comanche stopped dead. I remember thinking: I’ve got you sons of bitches now, ain’t I? Oh, ain’t I? I had forgot Little Man’s war song or I’d have sung it.

But I didn’t have them by no means. A warrior suddenly rode over, picked up the shirt-head on the point of his short lance, looked at it and throwed it away, and then they took me captive.

Well, you can’t call it a failure. Had I not done it, they would have killed me. And I learned a valuable lesson: Don’t try to fool an Indian who has seen a lot of white men. The Comanche had been raiding the Santa Fe Trail for forty years.

They didn’t treat me bad, and I reckon they intended to trade me off for guns or something, but having been put to herding their horses for them, one night I stole one and rode off. It was fast and hard travel, and before long he died on me and I continued to New Mexico on foot. It was the end of summer before I reached Taos, in the mountains north of Santa Fe. For quite a time I hadn’t seen a town of any description, so I was rather cheered just to see the Pueblo Indians’ dwellings there, though I never could get up much affection for that type of redskin, who was always farmers and lived clustered together like bats from time immemorial. With the whole world open to them, they settled down and raised little patches of beans. The Comanche used to raid them every once in a while and so did the Navaho and Apache. A wild Indian don’t like a tame one.

There was a white town down the trail a piece from the Indian one, so I went on down there. I was sure a sight after those weeks in desert and mountain. I’d kneel down and drink from a pool with my eyes shut so as not see my ugly reflection.

So I can’t blame a famous hero for what he done when I showed up at his front door. I saw this adobe house, see, built around one of them inner courtyards, and I figured this was where I might get a handout. So I goes onto the veranda, and the door was open for it was hot weather, and I calls into the cool, dark interior: “Anybody to home?”

A fellow about my size, short that is, with a sandy mustache and real bandylegs, appears from the shadows within and says: “Git on out of here, you hairy son of a whore.”