I would have lived in that camp on the Washita throughout the winter, and when the new grass come up in the spring we would have broken the treaty and moved north, got us buffalo and Pawnee en route, and maybe run one of them antelope surrounds again if Old Lodge Skins was up to it and if the railroad hadn’t scared away all the game, and so on up to the Powder River for some good fights with the Crow, and bear hunts and lodgepole-cutting in the Bighorn Mountains. All the while I’d have had them four women tending to my every little wish.

I seen General Custer as responsible for my loss. And I didn’t yet know how nor where I would do it, but I decided to kill that son of a bitch.

CHAPTER 19 To the Pacific and Back

WHAT BECOME OF SUNSHINE? If I couldn’t find her body she must have got away; probably waited till the cavalry had swept past the lodge, then slipped out and made it to the bluffs. She was a resourceful and resolute woman, and better than me at that sort of endeavor.

An Indian was more suited in mind and spirit for taking this type of beating than me. Here was I, aiming to kill Custer on the one hand; and on the other, I also decided I could never again live with the Cheyenne, for the simple reason that I couldn’t afford to undergo another massacre on the losing end.

Darkness fell while I was still setting there on the banks of the Washita, plotting murder. It had got monstrous cold, and me covered only with a flannel shirt and cavalry jacket. The troopers had looted every blanket and robe in the village, beyond what they burned, for they had left their overcoats and haversacks back where they started their charge that morning, and the Cheyenne had circled round and got that stuff. Talk of having no weapon-I must first find some protection for my own hide or the weather would do me in before I put a blade in Custer’s.

So I went to what was left of them lodges where the captives had been gathered. Luckily, a little hunk of one tepee skin had not been altogether burned. So I beat out where it was still smoldering and wrapped myself in it. Buffalo hide it was, with the hair scraped off, so afforded none too great a warmth. And not only was it cold in that place, but the moon come out and shone across that field of pony corpses, and now the coyotes had got to them and I also saw the big ghostly shapes of the gray wolf, a nasty creature, and the noise of them fangs tearing at limp flesh and the growls and whines was quite unpleasant.

I just had to start a fire, for the sight of so much carrion gives a wolf the confidence to take on something living. I was scraping among the ashes of the tepees, trying to find a coal still burning, when I heard the sound of horses coming from downriver. Custer had carried out his bluff, you see, threatening the villages in that direction so the Indians would strike them and run without hitting him; then he turned and come back.

Wolves, coyotes, and me melted away. I don’t know where the vermin went: I retired into the brush, and more listened to than watched the column troop through the razed village. Then, after the rear guard had passed, I fell in a quarter-mile behind and followed them at this interval some hours up the valley of the Washita to where they finally made camp. Oh, but it was a cold and barren march for me, the desolation adding to the temperature. My only solace was that them troops dwelt in a similar predicament as to the weather. But they had comrades in misery, whereas my recent partners was dead or dispersed.

Soon they lighted great bonfires which illuminated the riverbottom. Well, I could just as soon cut Custer’s throat after I singed my shanks a little, I thought. Indeed, without so doing it wasn’t likely I could lift my knife for the shivering. So I snuck through the picket line and pushed up close through the throng about one blaze.

Some soldier wrapped in an Indian blanket says: “You ain’t got a chaw?” I shook my head. The reflection of the flames flickered in his blear-eyes. He says: “Wasn’t that a brilliant idea of Hard Ass’s to leave the packs and overcoats behind? I reckon he’ll get another medal for that.”

A fellow on my other side says: “I don’t doubt he kept his own overcoat and a side of bacon which his striker is frying up at this minute.”

“Custer’s luck, hey boys?” This come from the blear-eyed fellow, and someone else said hush or Hard Ass would hear him.

“Screw him,” says Blear Eyes. “What’s he gonna do, put me on half rations?”

The other soldier says: “He’ll have a hole dug right through the snow and throw you in it, boy.”

“He will?” I asks, trying to seem a natural part of this group.

“Will he? You must be a recruit or you’d know he done the very thing on the campaign a year ago last summer. Ask Gilbert,” nodding at a long, thin soldier with a crooked nose and a growth of whiskers who was rubbing his skinny hands towards the fire. This man says: “Yeah, we was in the field and he never had no guardhouse. Some of us boys showed up late for call, so he had this hole dug in the ground, thirty foot square, maybe fifteen deep, and throwed us in, then put boards acrost it. Fierce hot it was under the sun, and there was too many of us to lay down all at once.”

“Then Hard Ass himself goes over the hill to see his old lady,” Blear Eyes says. “Runs right off an Indian campaign. And you know all that happened to him? Suspended from command for one year, and he goes back to Michigan and spends it fishing.”

Gilbert says: “I don’t condemn the bastard for running back to his woman, much as I hate him, for there’s a pretty piece of fluff.”

“That right?” says I. I was fair warmed now and beginning to plot my course.

“Oh my yes. You ain’t never seen Miz Custer? I tell you when you do you’ll howl and lay down and lick the dirt, boy, and go to bed next night with Rosy Palm and her five sisters. That’s the difference between a general and a private. Hey, who’s for going over to the prisoners and getting us an old squaw?”

The conversation degenerated from that point on, as you might expect if you know anything about an army, and I edged off and proceeded across the campground. If I was going to assassinate Custer, I first had to locate him without arousing suspicion, which was not easy, since six or seven hundred soldiers was present and I was not tall enough to see over anybody’s head.

The Cheyenne captives had an area and a couple small fires to themselves, and they was now so many silent blanket-rolls upon the earth, the children wrapped right in with their mothers: nothing keeps a redskin from his sleep. Down a ways beyond that, their ponies was herded, with a wide separation between them and the cavalry horses, who the Indian animals make nervous.

I made quite a scout of that bivouac, which was spread out and well lighted by the enormous cottonwood fires; and with the men cold and tired and hungry, what a slaughter could have been managed by fifty Indians. But the tribe had been whipped and then tricked, and anyway they never fought at night. Custer could just as well have pulled in his guards. Only one active enemy lurked in that area.

That was me, and by a process of elimination I found him at last. The officers had their fire at the base of a little knoll, but the General wasn’t there, he was by himself on top of the slight eminence. He had his own little blaze, and was seated on the ground alongside it, writing by its yellow light. Occasionally his striker, that is the orderly who done his servant-work, would come up and put a new log on the flames, which he had got from a detail of poor devils who was kept cutting wood in the timber all night and hauling it into camp.

So on one of their trips in with a load, I joined these last and helped them stack logs, which they did not question, and watched for Custer’s striker to come over for a supply, which he finally done just before my back was broke.