Lavender looks sad. He says: “I married a Sioux woman of the Hunkpapa band and lived several year in a tepee made of skin.” He shook his head and that feather quivered in the band. “They are real good people, and you take old Bull, I reckon for an Indian he is what you could call a genius. When he wants to see what is happening anywhere in the world, all he has to do is close his eyes and dream and he’s got it clear.”
“Yes,” I says, “that’s right.”
The sun reflected off the lobes of Lavender’s widespread dark nose. “You recall the Reverend Pendrake, Jack,” he says. “How he was always spouting principles. They was good and even holy ones, I guess, and it was on account of them that he bought me from my old master and give me freedom. So I might be ungrateful when I say the longer I listened to him, the more I thought: he is a fool.”
“So did I,” I says, “even as a young boy.”
“But why, Jack, why did we think that?” Lavender was real quizzical, and took off his hat and dropped it to the ground, showing his head of frizzy curls. “For I was black,” he says, “but you knowed how to read and write.”
I says: “Speaking for myself, I thought he was talking about how things should be rather than as they was.”
“That’s right! That’s it!” shouts Lavender. “Whereas an Indian has it the other way around.… Well then,” he goes on, “why did both you and me turn about in time and leave the Indians, too? Tell me that.”
I says: “Because we wasn’t born barbarians.”
“You said it.”
“And it don’t work if you are aware of anything else,” I goes on.
“It’s perfect if you been born in a tent and carried on your Ma’s back and lived with hocus-pocus since the day you was born and never invented the wheel.”
“If you come from civilization,” says Lavender, “to live among the savages, it is fine for a while and then you get so powerful curious as to what is going on back home, you can’t stand it. You got to see, so you come back, and it might be good or it might be awful, but it is happening.”
He pulled in his line and picked up his fish, and we went back towards where his tent stood at the edge of the bivouac.
“We got that straightened out,” I says. “But what I wonder now is why you have come back to this country?”
Lavender looked sort of embarrassed at that. He says: “I ain’t here to fight the Sioux. I signed on as interpreter. When they see this army, why, maybe they’ll return to the agencies.”
“You think they will?”
“No,” he says. “And if they shoot at me, I reckon I’ll shoot back.”
The next day I finally seen Custer. I was still there unofficially and could have strung along that way for quite a time in a camp of that size, where as I have said there was lots of civilians as wagon drivers and such, and I considered so doing, for I was an enemy in this midst and it seemed less like treason if I didn’t sign on for nothing. But then I thought that if I was around long enough, people would become aware I wasn’t attached to any of the various services and begin to ask questions. I was afraid my sympathies might show up in any prolonged conversation with a white man, for you couldn’t walk nowhere among that bunch without hearing how they was going to whip old Bull and his cutthroats, only good redskin was a dead one, etc. On that subject, the troopers would even forget their dislike of Custer and talk of what a fighter he was.
Then I still never knowed what I intended to do. The Indian camp had not yet been located, Major Reno and his command being out on a reconnaissance mission along the Tongue River at the moment to determine just that. I guess I had some vague plan when the village was found to slip off and get there before the troops and warn the hostiles, though it was too likely I would get killed long before contacting any Cheyenne who might recognize me.
The best move at present seemed to be getting hired as scout, and that required an interview with Custer. General Terry might be in official command, but I got the impression that he did the talking while Custer acted.
I went to the headquarters tent of Son of the Morning Star and bluffed my way past the orderly-a different man from the Washita striker-and walked inside to a little camp table, and there sat the General behind it, a-scribbling as usual. I don’t know that anyone has ever pointed out what a writer Custer was: letters to his wife most every day, and he also done a whole series of articles for the Galaxy magazine while in the field. I believe he was writing such now.
He did look different with his long hair cropped off like a normal person’s, a little weaker maybe, but then that might have been only the superstition of Bloody Knife. However, I saw something else before he lifted his eyes to me. It was day outside, but he was using a candle as additional illumination, and as he was bent over his papers, the top of his hatless skull lay directly in my sight and there, on either side of a sparse yellow forelock, long spearpoints of pink skin run back almost to meet at the crown. Custer was getting bald.
I felt a touch of human feeling for him on the sudden, which soon left while he made me stand there for quite a time without acknowledgment.
At last he scratches in a full stop on his writing, and he waits for it to dry, lays aside his pen, then stares coldly at me.
“State your business,” he says in that raspy voice I had not forgotten.
“General,” I says, a-trying to keep down the distaste that had again replaced that short-lived other feeling, “I was wondering whether you could use another guide or interpreter. There is Cheyenne out there with the Sioux, and I lived among-”
“No,” he says, and picking up his pen again, called: “Orderly, show this man out.”
That trooper entered the tent and stood aside for me to exit, but I got sore and wouldn’t move and when he took ahold of my arm to assist my departure, I pushed him off and says: “Boy, you touch me again and I’ll lay you open with my pigsticker.”
Custer looked up at that and broke out in a dry laugh with more air in it than sound.
“You’re peppery, aren’t you?” he says. “I like that. All right, orderly, you can retire.” Which the trooper does, glowering at me. Then Custer settles back in his camp chair with a superior smile and says: “Now then, what makes you think you might be useful to me?”
I was still riled, but I managed to mention some of my experiences with the Cheyenne while of course omitting everything about the Washita.
“Oh, Cheyenne,” he broke in before I had got much out, “but not Sioux? Well, my good fellow, you are eight years late. As you may have heard, I trounced the Cheyenne in 1868 down in Indian Territory. You apparently do not keep up with things.”
I tell you, it was his grin that burned me more than the substance of his comments, but I knowed that if I really let my temper go, I’d kill him.
So I says, level as I could: “There’s still enough Cheyenne north of the Platte to give you a run for your money, especially if they have joined with the Lakota.”
“Oh,” says he, “a few stragglers, perhaps, have made their way north to join these malcontents, but I can whip the whole lot with one troop of the Seventh-unless the Indian agents have managed to equip them with the latest Winchester repeating arms, in which case I shall need two troops. In my opinion, a better campaign might be waged against the latter gentry, the scoundrels who, on the one hand, speculate in the Indian annuities and, on the other, excuse and prevaricate about the depredations of the savages under their protection.”
On this subject he become genuinely exercised, frowning beneath them heavy pale brows and nose getting real pointy. “I find it quite sinister,” he says, “that these men can connive-for that is what it amounts to-in the atrocities against their own countrymen. For example, the official at the Red Cloud Agency has been so lax with his barbarous charges that they lately, with murderous threats, frustrated his attempt to raise the American flag above his office!”