Well, I was glad to see old Caroline and even gladder to have someone care for me a bit, but after them months of dissipation and shame I didn’t have much energy and my mind was weak, so I soon fell to sleep.

Next day I felt real horrible and required whiskey merely to sustain the breath of life itself, but Caroline wouldn’t allow me any, soaked me instead for hours in a tin tub they had in that house. All day and the next she soaked me, pouring in fresh kettles of boiling water whenever the tub got bearable to my hide, and when I finally emerged from this treatment I might have had the poison sweated from me but it took along with it the rest of my juice as well, and I had the rubber legs of a foal.

Caroline hadn’t changed much. Her features had coarsened up some, and she chawed tobacco always, which did not benefit her teeth; and though she washed regular as most, the smell of mule was right noticeable in her presence, for that was what she did for a living: drove a team, hauling out of Omaha for the Union Pacific Railroad, then a-building along the River Platte.

While I was still weak she related the story of her intervening experiences between the time she left me in Old Lodge Skins’s tepee and the present date. These I gather was varied and characterized by violent ups and downs, for I think you have the correct idea by now that Caroline was romantic as they come and thus ever being disappointed.

She had gone on farther west, been to San Francisco itself. That was where she had tried to hire on as seaman on a ship, but the crew thereof, they was quicker than the Cheyenne to discover her gender, and pitched her into the bay. I don’t know why Caroline could never get it through her thick head that the way to attract men was not to do what they did, but rather-no, I do know: she thought she was ugly, that’s why. Only she wasn’t. She wasn’t beautiful by a long shot, but she was nowhere near hideous, just had a strong cast of feature.

Well, she had got a better idea when the Civil War started and went East for that and took up nursing the wounded, at which I believe she must have been right good with her qualities of muscle and stamina added to a real feminine nature underneath. She sure liked men, that Caroline, no mistake about that; in fact, her troubles could be traced to the fervor of that taste. In time she fell in love with a man she met in a military hospital near Washington, D.C., which shows you how far east she ranged. He was not a casualty but rather a male nurse who worked alongside her, a real cultivated person who went so far as to write poetry in his spare time. According to Caroline, he was shy but she felt sure he returned her feeling, for he give her some of his writings and it was full of burning passion and though he never come right out and admitted it to her face, she knowed she was the one he meant, and together they bathed and bandaged them poor devils, and the very suffering around them cemented their love for one another, etc.

I see no need to go through the whole story, for the point is that when this fellow got to where he saw Caroline was in great sympathy with him, he confessed he was in love with a curly-headed little drummer boy what had got his rosy shoulder barked by a Minie ball. It had never occurred to that sister of mine to question why some big healthy man would be volunteering to carry bedpans when he could have been out fighting. I remember this individual’s name, but I ain’t going to mention it, for he got quite a reputation in later times for his robustious verse, some fellow told me once, and I wouldn’t want to sully no one’s pleasure in it, in case it’s still being read at this late date.

So much for Caroline, who had then brought her broken heart out West again and took up mule-skinning. She wasn’t embarrassed at all about mistaking me at first for a potential lover, having been hardened by her various troubles in that area. I reckon she figured now that the only way she would ever get a man was to carry him off as she did me.

I asked if she had ever in her travels run across any of the rest of our family.

“No, I never,” she says, throwing her boot across her knee and spitting a thin stream of tobacco juice into a spittoon the landlady furnished her with, “though I heerd from a soldier in the hospital that he served with a Bill Crabb who died a hero at Fredericksburg, and I reckon that was our little brother, God rest his soul.”

Nothing to my mind was less likely than that Bill had straightened out from what I saw him as in ’58, but I didn’t mention that to her. Also, at present I was hardly in a position to cast aspersions on another man.

And the next thing Caroline says was: “Tell me about yourself, Jack, and how it was you went bad.”

That was putting it on the line. So I related my story, and I’ll say this for Caroline, she had never paid much attention to me as a little kid and even deserted me there among the Indians, but she realized after a while now that I done a few things worthy of her attention and give it freely. And it is strange that though she made a mess of her own affairs, it was her attitude towards my calamity that pulled me out of that hopelessness I had fell into.

For when I told her about the capture of Olga and little Gus, she says, quite merciless: “You best forget about them, Jack. They have shorely been kilt long since.”

“Don’t talk like that, Caroline.”

“I was just saying what it appears you already decided for yourself, Jack old boy,” my sister states, making another use of the spittoon. “You should know how Indins act, if you lived with them as long as you claim to. And then I take it you ain’t forgot the way they butchered Pa and misused me and our Ma. I for one have never got over that experience. You was probably too young at the time to recall how attractive I used to be as a young gal afore my maidenhood was brutally stole by them dirty beasts. I still have nightmares upon the subject.”

I reckon Caroline believed this, for it give an excuse for her failures at love; just as my brother Bill took from his own version a motive for becoming what I had seen him. Lest you think I am being too hard on my family, I might say that they wasn’t the only ones who found Indians right useful in them days for explaining every type of flop.

And there was I, in the same situation. My wife and child had indeed been captured by the savages, and it was certainly possible they had been killed. But it never give me no excuse to throw over my manhood, and no matter how many misadventures you suffer, you ain’t a genuine and absolute failure until that occurs.

But I had lost my old free ways during them years of respectability in Denver, and it was the wildness of that experience on the Arkansas which had unmanned me.

“Oh, they mightn’t have kilt your woman,” Caroline goes on. “They maybe just-”

Funny how members of your own family, even when you haven’t been specially close to them, can drive the knife home with perfect accuracy. In this case, though, it was more complicated: if you recall, I always figured Caroline had been disappointed that the Indians had not offered her violence. Sight unseen, she was jealous of Olga on several counts: for being married, for having had a kid, for likely being raped; these in addition to the natural disapproval felt by a sister for the woman who has got her brother.

All of which produced a change in Caroline’s attitude. She stopped the reclamation procedure that had begun to straighten me out-baths, solid food, and so on-and brought in a jug of whiskey and encouraged me to drown my sorrows in it.

She found me more satisfying as a derelict, I expect. My sister really had the same type of taste as them men who was entertained by the spectacle of my degradation. The Cheyenne would have been depressed to see a fellow tribesman gone to rot; they would have believed it reflected discredit upon all Human Beings. On the contrary, an American just loves to see another who ain’t worth a damn. And my sister proved no exception.