Well, he had kept it up so far, and I didn’t know why we wasn’t seen and shot down except maybe because the sheer audacity of the stunt made us invisible to the soldiers, but would he march through them skirmishers and into the crossfire?

He would and did, and we went untouched though, as if in accompaniment to his song, I heard much whistling of lead about my ears. But one thing happened: the Indians stopped shooting till we reached the bank. They saw us all right, and I think their so doing is the only thing that kept me from being permanently warped by that experience. That, and the shock of jumping waist-deep into the frigid water, which felt like I had been skinned from toe to belly-button.

Once me and Old Lodge Skins was in the Washita, the other Indians pushed us downstream after the women and children. Someone said: “Leave the river at the big bend, where the depth is over the head from shore to shore.”

I reckon they took me for the chief’s personal nurse in his blindness. I was reluctant to go, what with Sunshine and Morning Star still hiding beneath the robes in our tepee, so far as I knew. But I couldn’t do no good for them. The soldiers now had complete possession of the village and was already herding together such women and children as had neither resisted nor run. They’d no doubt soon find my two and add them to the captives, and all I’d accomplish by making an attempt at this time to liberate them would be to get myself executed as a renegade, if not shot down before my identification was established.

So off we waded, the chief and myself, and now I led him rather than vice versa as it had been this far, for he had come out of his medicine spell on entering the water and was a blind old man-which I guess given his character was typical now that the worst of the danger was temporarily gone. He was his best when confronting a menace. Keeping under the bank we was out of the line of fire, and made good progress, though after a time in that freezing element my body felt like stone.

We waded for about three-quarters of a mile when we overtook the women and children what had gone on before, they being slowed by the smaller kids, some of whom was in up to the neck. I dropped that junk I carried for Old Lodge Skins, including both our rifles, and seizing one little boy, put him upon my shoulders. In this fashion we did another good mile to the horseshoe bend, and then all left the water to avoid that deep section, with a purpose to cut across the intervening tongue of land and re-enter the river below.

The air was ferocious upon my wet clothes. I swung that boy to the earth and he rejoined his mother and her other children, but we hadn’t got much farther when that woman set down and begun to tear strips from her dress and bind them about the feet of her offspring, which I reckon was about to freeze off though the kids had not made a sound.

That was when a party of cavalry rode up on our rear. I realized later that this was the detail commanded by Major Joel Elliot, who Custer sent downstream to strike a large concentration of Cheyenne on the south shore, below our family group. We had three armed braves with us, traveling as guards, and a man called Little Rock who had a muzzle-loader stopped and shot a horse from under a trooper, and the instant after, himself fell dead from the answering fire.

The women and children hastened to get back into the river, and I must say I went along with them. There was a moment there when Little Rock fell that I thought I should go pick up his gun and perform a manly role, but another of the remaining two braves beat me to it.

Well, the women and children was almost all into the water, below the bend, and me and Old Lodge Skins was just climbing down the steep bank to join them when a man shouts down from above: “You can come back. We have surrounded them.”

So I push Old Lodge Skins up again, and he is seemingly lighter to move than when we was on the downslope.

He says, right lively, handing me his medicine bundle, “Give me my rifle. I want to rub out some soldiers before the young men get them all.”

“I left it over there,” I says and takes that opportunity to slip away. There was plenty of women around to help him from now on, and a great body of Cheyenne was running up from the south, while others had got between the cavalry detachment and the river, driving them into the tall grass of the rising ground towards the bluffs.

The trooper unhorsed by Little Rock’s shot had earlier dropped off to take captive the woman who was binding her children’s feet. She had delayed till he was surrounded. Now I saw the rush that overwhelmed him, and when the Indians cleared away, he was stripped naked and lay red upon the trampled snow.

Elliot’s command dismounted and let go their horses, which run wildly down the valley and the soldiers lay in the high grass, where they was concealed except for the smoke of their carbines. They kept up a steady fire, but it was panicky and unaimed, most of it straight up into the winter sky, and when the Indians saw that, they didn’t bother to creep up no more but those that was mounted rode right in and commenced killing them like chickens, and the women and children come up to watch. The fight lasted maybe twenty minutes, and at the end all you could see was the swarm of Cheyenne backs as they bent to take coup and butcher.

I don’t know if you ever seen carnage in winter. It ain’t pretty at no season, but in the cold the blood soon freezes and a body stiffens up before you know it. If you wait too long, you have to break its limbs to get its shirt off.

I mention this not to be ghoulish but to list my motive in hastening into the grass: I needed one of them uniforms. There was forty-fifty Indians and only fifteen bodies to be shared among them. I had a bit of luck: I run into Younger Bear, on his knees and at work with a knife. I realized now that he had been one of the two or three braves who had first rode in among the soldiers. He was wearing a big war bonnet that I hadn’t recognized. His left shirt sleeve was reddened and drops of blood was dripping from the fringe onto the nose and lips of the corpse he was scalping. He was also sweating profusely, for I guess his knife was dull and that left arm didn’t have no strength to pull the hair away as the skin was severed.

However, he was quite calm as to mood. He noticed my leggings alongside him and said without looking up: “You pull while I cut.”

So I did. I knelt and took hold of them light-brown, rather fine-textured locks of the dead white man. I think he was right young. His mouth was strained open as if in a silent cry. I endeavored not to study him, for he might have been somebody I once knowed, and there wasn’t anything personal in what I was doing. So at length his skull cover come free, and I was obliged to Younger Bear for taking it quickly from me.

“I saw you charge in to take coup before,” I says. “That was brave.”

The Bear wiped the sweat from his brow and left a great smear of blood in its place. He sighed and shrugged, but he was pleased. He handed me his knife and said, as you might to a guest sitting before a roast turkey: “Go on and take something for yourself. There is a pretty ring on his left hand.”

“Well,” says I, “I could use the shirt and pants.”

Younger Bear makes a gesture as if to say it’s on the house, and I got the uniform off that soldier and his boots, and later I found his hat nearby. I bundled that stuff under my arm, and the Bear went back to work. The soldier now lay in his wool underwear. He had unbeknownst to himself done me a favor, and I thought I would try to return it though he might never know that either.

I said to the Bear: “You had better get your arm tied up before you bleed to death.”

He looked like he noticed it for the first time, poked the muscle and winced.