I knew that if I let him continue on that note he would commence to sing his death song at any minute and then I’d never get anything else out of him, so I says right quick: “But that will not happen until all those barrels of whiskey are gone, so drink up.”
At which he was some cheered and filled his fly-trap again.
“Many Sioux and Cheyenne out there?”
He says: “Numerous as stars on a clear night.”
I pointed back towards the camp. “But look at all those soldiers. And more will come from the west and south.”
Bloody Knife shook his dirty head of tangled hair. It was graying some at the temples. “It does not matter,” he says. “We will all be rubbed out. Long Hair will never be the Great Father in the chief village of the white men, as he wishes. I like him a lot, but his medicine has turned bad.”
He goes on that Custer had come to him and the other Ree a night or so since, give them presents, and said he would whip the entire Sioux nation before the month was out, in return for which the American people would make him President.
Well, Grant was in trouble on account of them crooks in his Administration, and when you figured he had got to the White House by whipping the Rebs, a similar result might transpire for the man who sent the Indians under, for they was the only outstanding enemy of the U.S.A. at this particular time in the hundredth year of our Independence from the tyranny of the Old Country.
“I reckon he would like to get it all done by the Fourth of July,” is what I wanted to say, but that is a hell of a difficult speech to make by signs. The Cheyenne know July as “the Moon When Buffalo Are Mating,” but I didn’t know what the Ree called it. However, I made the buffalo-horns, and the motion for screwing-which is the same as used by every white schoolboy-and for moon, and for the fourth day thereof. Still, what would a Ree know of the historical meaning. So I says the day when the soldiers made a lot of noise, shooting cannon and the like.
A look of dim recognition come over his dark face. “And get drunk?” he asks.
“Oh, hell,” I says aloud in English. “What does it matter? Drink up, you poor son of a bitch.”
He shortly passed out, and I took the precaution of unloading his rifle, in case he woke up before the effects had worn off.
I had learned what I wanted to know. I reckoned, in view of Custer’s current needs, this upcoming battle would make the Washita look cheap. Bloody Knife’s pessimism did not impress me. I didn’t care how many hostiles had collected, I knowed they wasn’t organized, never had much modern armament, and was living with their wives and kids.
Well, what was I going to do about it? That old childish idea of assassinating Custer was obviously out. Such a stunt, pulled off now, would just make the Seventh fight harder. They all hated his guts-no sooner had I got off the Far West than I heard the troopers grousing about him: they was particularly burned up that he hadn’t let them be paid till they got into the field, which meant that even if they never found a hostile Indian, there’d be men in an outfit that size who would die of rattlesnake bite and the like, without having had a little celebration in town before they went on their last campaign. But once he had been shot by me, or stabbed in the back, he would turn into a hero. Anyway, General Terry was in actual command, so the campaign would not stop.
Now I had left Bloody Knife under the sagebush when, walking back to camp a-studying this matter, who should I spot but a figure out of the distant past, sitting on the bank just beyond where the Powder emptied into the Yellowstone.
His skin was darker yet than a Ree’s and he wore a flop hat with an eagle feather in it. By God if he had changed much in twenty year.
I says to him: “Well, Lavender, this is some surprise.”
For that is who it was, and he looked at me right polite and says I had the advantage on him.
“Jack Crabb,” says I. “The Reverend Pendrake, in ______, Missouri.”
He studies me careful and says: “Go on.” Then he takes off his hat so he can see better, stands up, peers into my face, kind of groans, then laughs, and I grabs him and gives him a bear hug. I don’t know why, it was more like finding a long-lost relative than when I had actually done so on several occasions.
After we got through with exchanging the pleasures of re-meeting, I says: “Tell me what you’re doing here. Has the Reverend become a chaplain?”
“No, not him,” says Lavender, who must now have been around forty-five years of age and had a few gray hairs when I looked him over close, but the mahogany skin of his face was still unlined. He was dressed in buckskin jacket and pants with fringe, and if I wasn’t wrong, his belt showed beadwork in the Sioux fashion. “No,” he says again, and then: “My oh my, I ain’t thought on that Reverend for many a year. He died, Jack, not long after you run off. Et himself to death, is what happened. He packed away one of them gigantic dinners that Lucy made for him one noontime, then took a nap directly after, and some of that meal backed up and clogged his windpipe and he suffocated afore anyone knowed the difference, damn if he did not.”
At that minute Lavender got a bite on his fishline, for he had set down again and lifted his pole, with me alongside, and he pulled it out and there was a real nice fish on the hook, which he unfastened and tossed flopping on the bank.
“Well,” Lavender goes on, “the way I looked at it at the time, that man died happy, in the condition he liked best in all the world: stuffed with victual. I believe Lucy had cooked roast pork with applesauce that day.”
I suffered something between indigestion and heart flutter as I asked: “And Mrs. Pendrake? I reckon she got married again?”
Lavender was threading another earthworm on his hook. “The Lady,” he says, “no, the Lady closed up the shutters on that house and I recall never even attended the funeral. And the church got it a new preacher who was supposed to live in that house, but she never moved out and none of them white folks had nerve to ask her to do it, so the new one, he had to reside somewhere else, and as far as I know she is there yet.”
I was thinking my own thoughts: even for a minute the impulse run through my head to pack up whatever I was doing here and head back down to Missouri instanter, but I was old enough by now to accept the better sense. I was thirty-six and had been through too much. Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain’t done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.
But while I was staring into the Yellowstone at the current making a sort of watery arrowhead around Lavender’s fishline, he says: “I stayed on there for a year or so, but now it was a house of women, so I commenced to think again-” He slapped his hand upon the ground. “Sure,” he says, “it was you yourself what had lived with the Indians. I recall it now, Jack. How you and me talked of it. Well sir, what I done-for I was freed and could come and go as I liked-I went on West one day, like I had thought of doing for quite a spell. Thisheer kin of mine had gone out with Captain Lewis and Captain Clark.…”
He went on about that slave York again, not having as good a memory as me. Suffice it to say he had had various employments and adventures before he found the type of Indian who met his needs, but he finally did, and who was they but the Sioux of Sitting Bull!
This news brung me out of my thoughts. “You didn’t!” I says, and immediately regretted my choice of words, for you see Lavender wasn’t a darky no more. I mean, he was of course still a Negro person by race, but he wasn’t in any wise a servant nor had the mentality of such, and therefore was not any more used to having his veracity questioned.
He just looked at me with an evident pride which I immediately recognized as being Indian, and I said quick: “By God,” I says, “by God, old Sitting Bull! It just surprises me, that’s all. That’s who they’re going out after now, ain’t it?”