“Good at killing,” I says.
“And dying, if it comes to that,” says Lavender. He puts the pipe away into a buckskin bag, then says: “I wonder if you would write out a will for me.”
So I went through the twilit bivouac and the soldiers lounging about digesting their suppers, and now the fires was all extinguished for a flame can be seen many miles after dark, and I had to ask quite a few before I found a man who could lend me a pencil and even then he never had no paper except a letter from his wife which he carried for good luck in a pocket over his heart, so I saw two officers a-coming through the gloom and purposed to beg a blank page from the order books they generally carried.
They was Lieutenants McIntosh, Wallace, and Godfrey. I found out later from Botts that Custer had held a staff meeting that night, in total distinction to his usual practice of keeping his own counsel. He explained why he never took the Gatling guns and cavalry reinforcements, on the ground that the Gatlings being hard to transport would detain the column, and as to the other horsemen, he figured they would cause more jealousy between outfits than give help against the foe. Then he talked some more about the campaign and asked for suggestions from the officers.
Now this was an unprecedented thing for Custer to do. He had always told, in that raspy voice of his, and never asked. Bottsy says he had heard the General sounded almost pleading. “That mean son of a bitch. I wonder why.”
Anyway, this will make some sense of what I heard them officers say, as I remembered it later.
“Godfrey,” says Wallace, “I believe Custer is going to be killed.”
Lieutenant Godfrey asks: “What makes you think so?”
“Because I have never heard him talk in that way before.”
Mcintosh just looked from one to the other and didn’t utter a sound. He was a breed, his Ma being an Iroquois Indian back East, and was noted for his slow-moving, cautious ways. He was the only member of this trio who was himself soon to die. He must sometimes have had interesting thoughts.
Well, hearing that, I did not ask them officers for paper, but waited awhile and along came Captain Keogh by himself, with his big black mustache and little pointy underlip beard, so I put my request to him.
Keogh was an Irishman what had served in the personal guard of the Pope in Rome before coming to the U.S.A.
“Ah, sure,” he says, “go and tell Finnegan to give you a sheet from my writing case.”
Finnegan was his striker, who according to Botts kept all of Keogh’s money when they was at Fort Lincoln, lest the Captain drink himself to death on it. “Finnegan’s more like his guardian than striker,” Botts said.
I thanked him and started away, when Keogh put an odd question.
“Would you be writing your will?” he says.
“How’d you know that?”
He give a merry laugh, which was odd considering what he said then: “I made me own last night. But that was after Tom Custer and Calhoun took me at poker, so I don’t have much to leave behind.”
“Why then did you make it?” I asked humorlessly, for I was still under the influence of Lavender and them lieutenants.
“For the sheer hell of it,” says Captain Keogh, and his eyes was bright even in the dusk.
So I searched out Finnegan and got the paper and come back to Lavender, and him and me made out our wills, leaving such as we had to each other, and then the problem arose as to who should keep it, since we’d both be going into whatever fight occurred.
“Give it to Bloody Knife,” says Lavender. “Roll it up and stick it in a cartridge case and give it to him to keep.”
“Why,” I says, “he’ll be in the fight too, won’t he?”
“Not him,” says Lavender. “He’s a coward, like all Ree. At the first shot, he’ll turn and won’t stop till he sees the Missouri River.”
That just goes to show you there ain’t no race that has a monopoly on truth. In point of fact, Bloody Knife got shot in the head in the valley and his brains was blown all over Major Reno. However, that didn’t matter so far as our wills went, for I burned that paper. To have such a document in existence seemed bad medicine to me. I wasn’t the devil-may-care type of Captain Keogh, and maybe that’s why I didn’t get killed like he did.
Next day we marched thirty mile up the Rosebud, and within the first five we hit that Indian trail which Reno had found on his scout. Now I was still at the rear with them goddam mules, which was so slow that the main column would get miles on ahead, so when I seen the Indian trail, it had been overmarked in part by the iron shoes of the cavalry horses, but it was clear indeed that four-five thousand Lakota had made it, for it was. no less than three hundred yards wide and the abandoned campsites along it showed the circles from a thousand tepees, not to mention countless wickiups.
Less than half the total population would be full-fledged warriors; but as you know, an Indian boy from the age of twelve onward can be quite effective with a deadly weapon.
In addition to the Ree, we had acquired from Gibbon’s command a few Crow scouts-this area being home ground to that tribe. I figured Custer had plenty of advice on what could be read from the trail, so did not plan to offer my services again. Did not, that is, until I happened to speak to a lieutenant of the detachment that was guarding the pack train.
We had made one of our many stops so as to resecure the hardtack and cartridge boxes that was always slipping off the mules, and I says to the lieutenant in command, pointing to the Indian trail that extended so far in width beyond our own: “Big village.”
He smiles like I was a greenhorn and allows it showed a few hundred hostiles.
I asks if that was what the Crow and Ree scouts had reported.
“No, as a matter of fact it is not,” says he. “But when you have been on frontier duty as long as I have, you always divide by three any estimate you hear from a friendly Indian. These Crows are good boys, but fighting is not their strong point.”
Well, I have spoke about my worries for the Indians and then my disinclination to see these soldiers massacred, but I have so far not mentioned my growing concern for my own arse. I left that bastardly mule train pronto, and the lieutenant, figuring I was deserting, yells that I would never get my pay, but as usual he had the wrong slant, for I rode towards the head of the column.
Bloody Knife had sold me quite a broken-down pony. Indian-style, the animal was unshod and his hoofs had wore down real bad, so he was half-lame going over the rough terrain, the soil being flinty-hard and whatever grass had grown there was ate off by the immense pony herds of the Sioux. So it took me ever so long to pass the column and when I did, Custer wasn’t at the head of it but rather a mile or two still beyond. He was famous for riding away out on point, in front of the advance guard and sometimes the scouts as well, and on other campaigns, so I heard, damn if he might not do a bit of buffalo or antelope hunting while he was at it. But he was looking for Indians now, and when I seen him upon a bluff at about three-quarters of a mile from where I was, it looked as if he had found them and got personally surrounded.
I whipped the Ree pony into a gallop and was halfway towards rescuing him when I recognized he was merely talking with the Crow scouts. By time I reached the bluff, Custer had gone off again, but the Crow was still there: White Man Runs Him, Half Yellow Face, Goes Ahead, and a young fellow named Curly. Also the guide and interpreter Mitch Bouyer, who was a breed of Crow and white.
I felt uneasy around the Crow, owing to my memories, and White Man Runs Him was old enough to have been a grown warrior in the days when I fought them. Indeed, he studied me from time to time, and while it was unlikely he really had my number, he must have Indianlike sensed something.
So I was glad to see the chief white scout come riding up from the other side of the bluff. This was a man named Charley Reynolds, a stocky, round-shouldered fellow, one of the few real good white scouts I ever knowed and no long-haired blowhard like Buffalo Bill Cody and some of them others.