I said: “Oh, you hear the crashing of the snow crust up the valley. That is just the horse herd of your brothers and cousins.”

“No,” said my pony, stubbornly shaking his head as I undid the halter from the picket pin. His breath and mine was steaming great clouds in the cold.

“Come,” said I, “I’ll show you.” I mounted him and started out of the cottonwood grove which the camp was in among. My own tepee stood near the edge with no timber close enough to fall on it in case of storm, so we rode only forty yards to the open bottomland of the valley and looked up the meadow where the herd was. At that moment I heard a distant shot behind me, from the hills on the far side of the village. Reason I didn’t turn, though, was that straight ahead, galloping in a line that stretched across the snow-whitened bottom, come a great body of animals. But you can be fooled by the morning air and all the more when crystalline, which magnifies, so that at distance a man will seem a horse, a horse a buffalo. Allowing for this effect, I seen that charge as our pony herd in stampede, set off by Pawnee raiders. With a purpose to go get my gun, I wheeled; and as I did, a whole brass band commenced to play, trumpets, flutes, and drums. I thought I had lost my mind. It was an Irish tune called “Garry Owen,” what I had heard the post band at Leavenworth play in Sunday concert. At the first strains, my pony reared and throwed me. “I told you,” he screamed and bolted crazy towards the oncoming charge, going maybe fifty feet before his front legs broke at the knees and he plunged into the snow, skidding in a long trace of red.

He had been hit in the neck while I was still mounted, for that whole line had begun to fire upon the first notes. I was drenched with his blood. From about three foot above ground the air seemed solid with whining lead. Yet I got up and run untouched towards my tepee. I might have been yelling but couldn’t tell owing to the music. I couldn’t even hear the hoofbeats or the carbine fire, just that band blare.

Digging Bear was coming out of the lodge door, carrying my piece and a leathern pouch of ammunition. Ten yards still away, she throwed me the rifle and swung her arm back to hurl the pouch, but a little black hole sprung in her broad temple, like a fly had lit there, and she set down dead in the snow. A dozen more slugs snapped through the lodge cover behind her, and when I run inside, I seen young Wunhai had gathered half of them into that warm brown breast I had fondled several hours before, her deerskin bosom all bitten up.

Sunshine sat in the rear, Morning Star at her nipple.

“Down, down!” I shouts. “Lie flat.” She curled around the baby, and I covered her over with buffalo robes. I went to do the same for Frog Lying on a Hillside and Corn Woman and her children, but they were gone from the tepee.

By time I got to the door again, the bluecoats was so close they fired beyond our lodge into those in the timber behind. To leave by that egress would have put me under their hoofs, so with my knife I slashed a rent in the back and slipped through it. Indians was coming out everywhere, some not getting far before they went under, others diving behind cottonwoods and subsequently delivering a return fire, mainly arrows, but the targets was bad and their own folk running between.

The cavalry pounded in among the lodges now, the band still playing out in the open valley where they rested. That music was driving me batty. I belly-flopped behind a tree. I had not yet fired my piece, but not because of delicacy. No, I would have dropped them troopers without mercy had I the wherewithal to do it: they was ravaging my home, had killed two of my women, and because of them my dearest wife and newborn boy lay in uttermost jeopardy. At such a time you see no like betwixt yourself and enemy, be he your brother by blood or usage.

But my gun was empty. Around the lodge I kept it unloaded in case them children got to tinkering. The ammunition rested in that pouch under Digging Bear’s body, some fifty yards of galloping cavalry from where I lay.

Some Cheyenne had went to the river, leaped in, and was using the high bank as fortification behind which they covered the retreat down the center of the icy stream by a large body of women and children. I thought I saw Corn Woman and her young among them, but the gun smoke was thick now and closed across about that time, and when it cleared a trooper’s horse was shot under him and fell into my line of vision. I was distracted by the sight of them saddlebags, where the cavalrymen generally packed their extra ammunition. I run towards it, but before I got there the animal clumb to its feet and galloped away riderless. Just stunned, I reckon. But the trooper was hurt worse. He lay with his left boot at a strange angle from his upper leg. He was a young fellow, hardly beyond a boy, with a newly started mustache. Him and me, our eyes met, and a blaze come into his as they was windows in back of which somebody just fired a torch, but it was dying caused it and not recognition, for the next instant his head pitched forward showing the back of the skull busted open like an orange. And the Cheyenne who did it, using a wooden war club embedded with a triangular blade of rusty iron, took the lad’s carbine and cartridge belt and dashed for the river, whooping, but got his own as he leaped the bank, belched blood as he hit the water, and sank in frothing commotion.

Already the troops had passed into the lower reaches of the village, the noise suddenly half-distant as if from a fight in the room next door. I had a mind to go back to my lodge and fetch the cartridges from underneath Digging Bear, but knew the soldiers would soon reverse for the clean-up and my activity might bring them down on where Sunshine was hid, so I run among the other tepees, and that was when I saw the stout body of Black Kettle, sprawled near his lodge door. He had signed his last treaty. Sand Creek and now this. His wife lay nearby, still dying.

Old Lodge Skins, I thought: I must get to him. He’d be helpless now, with no sons and blind. So I doubled back, for his tepee was near my own, and on the way I passed numerous dead Indians and almost got shot by a wounded brave I didn’t know, but he went under before he could stretch the bowstring. The incident brought my appearance to mind. I hadn’t cleaned the black paint from my face of the day before-it keeps your nose and cheeks warm in winter-but some of it must have been scraped away in this or that activity since. Aside from that, my hair was wholly exposed. Well, I didn’t know what to do about it at the moment.

I plunged in through the entranceway of Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. Sure enough, he was still there. But he was not abandoned. Them two young wives of his was trying to get him to flee. The one had a baby strapped to her back. The other was especially wrought up, and automatically went for me with her butcher knife, though she used to see me often.

I held her off on the muzzle of my empty gun, and says: “You women run for it. I’ll help Grandfather.”

“Kill me then, too,” cries Tassel Woman, who had that knife.

“Get on out, you fool!” I yells, and stepping to the side, fetches her a swat in the ample hindquarters with the stock of the Ballard. “Go down to the river.”

That shook some sense into her, and the other with the baby said: “I believe you”; and they left.

“My son,” Old Lodge Skins remarked, quite casually. “Sit down beside me and we will smoke.”

Would you believe it? That old man set there upon his buffalo robe and commenced to fill his pipe.

“Grandfather, have you lost your wits? The bluecoats are wiping us out. We have only the time of a bird flight to get under the riverbank before they turn back.”

“Black Kettle is dead,” said he. “I know it. I am blind and cannot fight. Yet neither will I run. If it is my day to die, I want to do it here, within a circle.”