“They tell me Black Kettle attended this conference. I am only too familiar with the kind of treaties to which he touches the pen. I was at Sand Creek with him and lost my family, my friends, and my vision. Without eyes I see more clearly than he.”

Now it might have been to my own interest to want to stay down south, and even urge him to join the main body of the Southern Cheyenne, for if my own family was yet alive, that is where they would probably be. But I couldn’t, just couldn’t. I had a weakness where that old Indian was concerned.

So what I says was: “I can’t understand why you don’t go up to the Powder River. If you had done that when I first suggested it, you wouldn’t have been at Sand Creek.”

“I shall tell you why,” says Old Lodge Skins. “I prefer it in the Powder River country. I was born there, on the Rosebud Creek. Indeed, my medicine works only half-strength when I come below the Shell River,” which is what he called the Platte. “But the Americans, other than a few trappers, do not care about that country. So long as the Human Beings stay there, they will not be bothered by the white men.”

“That is exactly my point,” says I, wondering whether the old devil had lost his wits as well as his sight.

“Yes,” he said, “and I, chief of the greatest warriors on the face of the earth, I should avoid danger like the rabbit? I should let them drive me from this land where I have killed buffalo and Pawnee for eighty summers? A Human Being has always gone wherever he wished, and if someone tried to stop him, he rubbed them out or was killed by them. If I were so cowardly, my people would never respect me. There are many fine young men in this band, and they no longer have the doubts that our warriors had in the earlier days. They have decided to fight the white men wherever they can find them, and rip up those iron rails and drive away the fire wagons. Once that is done, they will kill all the remaining Americans, so that we can hunt again without being bothered and make war on the Pawnee.”

“Grandfather,” I says, “do you honestly believe that can be done?”

“My son,” says Old Lodge Skins, “if it cannot, then the sun will shine upon a good day to die.”

The Beecher Island fight took place, in which five or six hundred Cheyenne cornered fifty white scouts on a sandbar in the middle of the Arickaree Fork and besieged them there for nine days. But the whites was again armed with the Spencer repeaters and held off every charge, killing a good many Indians, among them the great Cheyenne warrior, Roman Nose. Then the cavalry came.

I wasn’t there, but our young men were, and they returned to camp full of weariness and defeat. I stayed inside the lodge for a time so as to avoid incidents, but I would not have had to, the way they was feeling. The Cheyenne still didn’t have no firearms worth the name, and it must make a man feel pretty bad to have the advantage in number but still be beat by the other fellow on account of his superior armament. I had long since buried that pistol of mine and generally kept the Ballard out of sight: no sense in adding to the ill feeling.

So what them Indians got to doing now was trying to lick the problem from the other end and dream up some medicine to make themselves impervious to bullets. One fellow seemed to have made it, for he had been shot at Beecher’s Island through the chest and did some hocus-pocus over the wound and it closed up without unfortunate effect, and he took the name Bullet Proof. So he fixed up several other braves with his medicine and a couple of weeks after the Island fight, they went against the cavalry. Out of seven Human Beings using that medicine, two was immediately rubbed out and Bullet Proof brought them back to camp and tried to raise them from the dead. One twitched his leg a little, stopped, and neither got up. Bullet Proof then admitted his failure.

I reckon it was because of such events that Old Lodge Skins and even his fierce young men had to limit their ambition to mere survival, and after a time we found ourselves with the village of Black Kettle, who the white men in afterdays sometimes called the great Indian statesman, I guess because he was always signing treaties to keep the peace and give away more of the Cheyenne hunting grounds to the railroads and ranchers.

Anyway, that’s how I happened to be at the Battle of the Washita. And as usual, on the side that lost.

WE JOINED BLACK KETTLE at the end of the big summer buffalo hunt in which all the tribe in the area come together, and then moved on down into the Nations, across the Canadian River, past the Antelope Hills, and onto the Washita, in that reservation what had been assigned to the Cheyenne by the treaty of Medicine Lodge. There was several camps there, strung along the river for about ten mile, more Cheyenne below us and Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, and some Apache too. The Indians figured to winter in that valley, which was well timbered with cottonwood.

It was nice, right nice, and Old Lodge Skins had been exaggerating in his bleak description. He still claimed the water was bitter, but I couldn’t taste it. However I didn’t chide him none, for he was outranked in this gathering, what with Black Kettle and Chief Little Raven of the Arapaho and Satanta, the famous cutthroat Kiowa who painted himself red to the waist and went about tooting a brass bugle. And they none of them paid much heed to Old Lodge Skins, being he had boycotted the Medicine Lodge council and was poor and had such a small band. There is a snobbery among all people who run things, white or Indian.

So my old chief set by himself most of the time and continued to dream and once in a while he would orate, but didn’t draw much of an audience these days, for his young men got to blaming him for not going to that council on account of the other Indians was boasting of the presents they had received for so doing and of the big show of riding the various tribes had put on for the Government commissioners, and a redskin hates to pass up a display or demonstration. Back in the old days when I was a kid we had camped near some Sioux on the Surprise River and one summer day they begun to yell and fire their pieces, and believing they was attacked we fell out to help them, but discovered they was only celebrating. Hump asked why and they said they didn’t know, but the soldiers over at Fort Laramie was doing it and the Sioux wouldn’t be found wanting in the celebration department. So Hump said he guessed the Human Beings better then, too, and all day we hollered and hooted and wasted ammunition. I figured out later it had been the Fourth of July.

You might have wondered what become of the two Indians who figured in my youth among the Cheyenne but seemed to have disappeared by this second residence: my enemy Younger Bear the Contrary and Little Horse, who was a heemaneh.

They had not been killed neither one, for I had asked after them and learned they was running with other bands, I expect so as to get companionship from others of their own kinds, Old Lodge Skins’s camp being too small to accommodate more than one apiece of them exotic professions. A Contrary must get mighty lonely, having to talk in reverse to all the standard people, and though a heemaneh hangs out a lot with the women, gossiping and sewing and all, he probably yearns for the company of others who understand his point of view.

I missed both of them fellows, for a like reason. I didn’t have no friends at all, other than Old Lodge Skins, and no private, personal enemies. There was plenty of surliness towards me, as I have said, and no more than I had learned to more or less walk unobtrusive past the young men of Old Lodge Skins’s band, we joined the enormous gathering around Black Kettle and the run-ins started all over again, for though the Cheyenne was officially supposed to be at peace now, they didn’t figure it to apply to white men and was still raiding the ranches and farms as long as the weather continued good, so they’d ride back in and see me and go for their weapons even in the middle of our village. It wasn’t me them young braves disliked, but the skin I wore. That’s my point about Younger Bear, who knowed me very well as personal enemies always do; and I realized, now that he wasn’t around no more, that I had taken a good deal of satisfaction from his enmity, which was particular and special, since we had growed up together.