“Of course,” the fellow says, lowering the bottle, “I generally goes over to the fort of an evening and take dinner with the commanding officer, a personal friend of mine, but during the day I get pretty lonely. It ain’t easy for me to deal with this trash, considering they murdered my whole family in front of my eyes and _____ all the women in it. I reckon when Kansas becomes a state one of these years, I’ll go up to Congress for Senator.” He took another swallow. “Sure you don’t want to take a pull of this? It’s still got the hair on it.”
But I turned my back on him and, stepping across that recumbent Human Being, left the tent. I didn’t drink whiskey as yet, and I never could stand to hear the lies of my brother Bill. I was just grateful he didn’t recognize me.
At Leavenworth, quite a big fort, I was quartered with an Army chaplain who had a little house for himself and family. This was a skinny horse-toothed fellow with a wife who resembled him strongly and several fair-haired children who didn’t look like either of them. I stayed there for several weeks, during which time whenever the wife and kids was out of the house and I was there with the chaplain, he’d ask me into his office and start talking oily about my spiritual well-being, in the course of which to make his point he’d lay a spidery hand on my knee. I think he was a heemaneh though he never went farther. I wasn’t sorry to leave when the time come, for in addition to that, his wife claimed I still stunk and made me bathe a lot.
At last I was called in to see the head officer there, a general with whiskers, and he said: “Well now, Jack, we’ve got a fine home for you. You’ll be schooled and get proper clothes and have a splendid father to look after you. You have a lot to catch up with, but you’re a bright boy. And if in later years you wish to pursue a military career, to follow the guidon with our brave boys, I’ll be glad to let you use my name.”
With that he stuck his head into a pile of papers, and his orderly led me outside to where that Army chaplain I had stayed with was talking to an enormous fat man sitting in a buggy.
I just want to say here that was the first and last time I saw the general. Nobody at Leavenworth ever asked me a word about the Indians I have lived among for five years. But neither had it occurred to the Cheyenne to ask me about the ways of the white man, not even when they was being destroyed by them. You got to knock a man down and put your knife at his throat before he’ll hear you, like I did to that trooper. The truth seems hateful to most everybody.
So I was brought outside to that buggy, and the chaplain says: “Here’s our little savage now.”
The other man had a square-cut beard of black, and he wore a black frock coat, but his belly was too great to fasten it across. His fat was hard and not soft, if you know what I mean. The old-time strong men used to be like that, with enormous potbellies that was fat but felt like muscle if you hit them there. I had seen pictures of such, and I thought maybe that’s what this fellow was.
So I immediately got the idea we’d be traveling around to the opera houses, giving shows, lifting sixteen midgets with one hand, breaking iron chains and all, for the chaplain says: “Jack, this is the good man who has graciously consented to adopt you. You must honor him as you would your own Papa, for that’s what he has become by law.”
The fat man glanced at me over his beard, shifted his powerful shoulders, and said in a voice as deep as if it echoed from a canyon bottom: “Can you drive a wagon, boy?”
I admired him and wanted to please, so said: “Yes, indeed, right good.”
“You’re a liar, boy,” he growled. “For where’d you learn to drive a wagon if you have been reared by the Indians? We shall have to beat the lying out of you.” He leaned down, grabbed my shirtfront, and lifted me into the buggy with only his left arm. It was like being levered up with the trunk of a tree.
The chaplain squealed: “Oh, Jack, you must be respectful to the Reverend and show him that you learned at least some manners in your short time among us.”
That was it: my new Pa was not a theatrical performer but another goddam preacher, as if I hadn’t had my quota of them, and his name was the Reverend Silas Pendrake. In addition to that black beard, he had thick black eyebrows, and his skin was white as dried pipe clay. He sure looked mean. I had retained my scalping knife in the waistband of them Army pants I still wore, underneath the shirt, and I considered putting it into his spine as we drove towards the Missouri River. But I was discouraged by the look of his enormous spread, which run about four foot from shoulder to shoulder and almost as thick through. I believed my blade would snap off against it, as if you’d stab a stone wall.
That knife and Muldoon’s six-foot clothes comprised my total property. They took my pony when we got to Leavenworth and I never saw it again. I think the chaplain sold it to compensate for my keep, and his tow-haired kids got to playing with my Cheyenne bow and broke it.
At the river Pendrake drove his buggy right onto the deck of a stern-wheel boat that was sitting there. His horse by the way was a big, patient gray animal; and you might figure how strong he was to pull his gigantic owner. That horse was a might leery of me, as I could tell from the curve of his nostrils: I reckon he could smell the Indian on me though I had washed at least four or five times all over in the months since leaving the tribes.
After a while they got that boat going, and it was interesting but I didn’t like it much because I remembered Old Lodge Skins would mention that if a Human Being, anyway, went over much water he would die. Of course I had been raised on the Ohio at Evansville, but that was long ago, and the Missouri to look at won’t build your confidence. It is always undermining its banks before your eyes, and I reckon that if enough years go by it will have worked its way out to Nevada and be irrigating them deserts.
I ain’t going to tell you where we was heading, except it was a fairly prominent town in western Missouri. The reason for my delicacy will be clearly apparent in the sequel, as they say. So we’ll just go on here from where we docked after a trip of some hours, and drove off the boat, and through the town to the better section of it, where Pendrake had himself a proper church and next door to it a two-story house of some substance, with a barn in back into which he run the buggy, and said to me the first words I can recall he uttered since leaving Leavenworth: “Do you know how to unhitch a wagon, boy?”
I had learned my lesson. “No, I don’t, sir,” says I. “Not a-tall.”
“Then you must figure out how to do so,” he rumbles, though not nearly as mean as he talked at Leavenworth, and I immediately got the idea that maybe his manner there was intended to offset the mincing ways of that chaplain, so I wouldn’t think all preachers was alike. I’ll tell you right now about Pendrake: he never seemed to know how to act natural except when eating; otherwise he appeared to be trying to live up to an obligation to someone or something else. I think if he’d of cut himself, he might bleed to death before working it out laboriously that the thing to do was put on a bandage.
Well, it wasn’t hard to study out how to unhitch that horse, and aside from tossing his head some, but doing that slow and heavy, the animal didn’t give me no trouble, and I got him in the stall. After that was done, though, I was in a quandary, on account of I still didn’t have no faith that Pendrake wouldn’t take a marvelous price for a bad guess. If I stayed in the stable and he expected me up at the house, there might be hell to pay. On the other hand, if I went to the house, maybe he’d rather I stayed in the barn. I decided for movement, as usual, and headed for the house, but instead of going into the back door which he had used, walked around to the front, thinking I’d avoid him for a time that way and also get the lay of the building in case I’d have to run for it.
I went up on the porch and through the front door, and into a hall where a hatrack stood fashioned of deer antlers, then stepped into a parlor which I expect wouldn’t look like much today but it was then a wondrous sight to me with the brass coal-oil lamps and tidies on the furniture to keep off hair-grease, for though Pendrake wasn’t exactly wealthy, he sure wasn’t seedy like my folks had been and wasn’t Army like that chaplain.