Little Big Man (32 page)

It was an hour before sunset when we topped a swell of ground that, with borrowed field glasses, give me a view on our abandoned stagecoach. The Cheyenne was gone from around it. Nor could I see anyone across on the sand hills, but they would be lying low over there, for at our distance we could not have been distinguished by them from more Indians.

That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway, as we trotted nearer, and then I broke for the far shore, lashing the tired cavalry mount through the soft bottomland that had thawed in the day’s sun, and into the water, and as he floundered with exhaustion gaining the opposite bank, I leaped from him and run, hallooing, up the bluff.

The first I come upon was the drummer. A procession of ants had already reached his eyes though he couldn’t have been dead above a few hours. Three arrows was in him, and his head naked and raw. Nearby lay the driver in a similar situation, his right hand also gone; for he was a good shot, and the Cheyenne had so acknowledged that fact.

The guard was badly sliced, but Perch not at all, he with the bandaged shoulder and frozen foot being spoiled, so to speak, for trophy-taking, and bald besides.

They had somehow been overrun. The driver might have got rubbed out, and then the rest of them went to pieces. I don’t know. I was fair numb as I descended into the hollow, but no Olga and no little Gus did I find there. Nor any place else in that region. The Cheyenne had carried off my family.

CHAPTER
15
Union Pacific

I AIN’T GOING
into the details of the hopeless trailing we did next day, for after their fashion the Cheyenne broke into many little elements and there was no way of knowing which included Olga and Gus. It was just as well, for had we got close with the troops, them Indians would likely have killed my wife and child out of pure spite.

As it stood, they might offer them for ransom sometime later on. If the Cheyenne hadn’t killed them at the Arkansas, they weren’t about to do it after they had gone to the trouble of kidnaping. I was fairly sure of that, though you can’t count on a savage to have his practical interest constantly in mind. If they got beat in some encounter with the whites, or if some brave got drunk—Well, there wasn’t any future in speculations of that type, which left me with nothing to do.

At the time, I only thought: Them bastards have my wife and kid. I reckon I might even have held a grudge against Old Lodge Skins, were he not up on the Powder River.

Of course, now I realize that him and his band would have been my best means of tracing the location of my family and buying them back. Provided I could have found that chief without being killed while looking for him—you couldn’t telegraph an Indian or write him a letter. Well, the point is I never tried. I went on back to Fort Larned with the troops and hired on as a scout for a while, but there wasn’t any more trouble along the Arkansas. The attack on our stage had been an isolated circumstance. The real action took place up along the Platte, where the Cheyenne had smoked the pipe of war with the Sioux and Arapaho, and together in a force of a thousand warriors raided the town of Julesburg in early January, plundering the stores there. For a month they terrorized the South
Platte, destroying ranches and stage stations, ripping the telegraph lines, and capturing wagon trains. Then in February they hit Julesburg again, and having sacked it once more, burned it to the ground.

In the spring the hostiles moved north into the Black Hills, and then on to the Powder. The Army went up there in summer and got more or less whipped in a series of engagements and then was caught in an early-autumn storm that killed most of their animals and come back, ragged and barefoot, making it only because Frank North and his Pawnee Scouts found them and led them in. The following year the Sioux and Cheyenne run Colonel Carrington out of the north country and made the Army vacate the forts he had built to protect the route to the gold mines of Montana.

I am working my stomach up to admitting here that instead of looking seriously for Olga and little Gus, I become a drunk. That’s a hard confession to make about yourself, and I have never done it before, but it is true. I lost my guts. I had got whipped at everything so far, and a habit of that kind can mark a man. When we patrolled the Arkansas the next few months and never found no hostiles, I was relieved, for I had got to thinking my family would be safer if the Indians they was with kept eluding or beating the Army. Maybe when things settled down, I could get me some negotiable items, blankets, beads, and such, wander among the tribes as a trader, and find Olga in that fashion.

Meanwhile I was drinking, and the more I drank, the less I saw about Indians in general and the Cheyenne in particular that I approved of. I won’t go into that, which was an elaboration of the feelings I had commenced to get in Denver. I’ll just say that now it no longer seemed stupid for me to hear somebody say what we ought to do was exterminate every one of them. For all I know, I may even have been the fellow who shouted that sentiment at the top of his voice, for I always heard it after I had got towards the bottom of the jug, and sometimes I’d be sitting all by myself along the stockade wall.

I had almost rather do it over again than to recount my ensuing wanders during the summer of ’65, for when I wasn’t drunk I was suffering the aftereffects, which is worse. I wended eastwards, and Kansas was building up now with the War over, and there was ranches and even towns where it was buffalo range before, and one wagon train had its nose at the arse of the next, and wherever you’ll find white men, you’ll find whiskey.

Now I didn’t have no money to use in a saloon, and I wasn’t in no condition to render service around a camp, like hunting, say, for I hadn’t a gun and couldn’t have steadied my hand if I had. I might have got me a drink or two out of sheer hospitality, but could hardly have consumed the volume of liquor I nowadays needed without some form of recompense to them who poured it.

So that accounts for how and why I become a buffoon. I mean, I would come into a wagon train at their evening stop, or up to a ranch house, or into a saloon if in town, and say: “How’d you fellers like some entertainment? You buy, and I’ll provide.”

There was a lot of curiosity in them days, and somebody’d always agree to the deal and set ’em up, and I would pack in enough rotgut to stop the tremor that got to running through my frame whenever I was empty, and then make a public spectacle of myself. I’d sing and dance, getting my talent from the drink, for I had no natural gift in those directions, being born hoarse and then the firewater roughed up my palate further, and I reckon it must have sounded like a raven announcing to the rest of his pack that he had just spotted some juicy carrion a-rotting on the prairie.

One of the songs I croaked out I had learned down in Santa Fe, which concerned a little mule, and I can dimly recall singing it once in a saloon in Omaha, Nebraska, and some of the boys there was mule skinners and they makes up from some belts and junk a mock pack saddle and puts it on my back and I trotted around on all fours on the floor while they booted my rump, and a specially mean type of soul fetched forth his long-lashed whip and I believe was ready to take skin from my hindquarters with it when another fellow stepped up to him and said: “I’ll take that off’n you.”

“You will like hell,” says the other.

I had collapsed on the floor at the moment and was watching them through my bloodshot eyes: I never really cared whether I was to be flogged or not. I couldn’t even recall at that point as to how I had reached Omaha, or why. I say this because if anybody had ever asked for a good beating, I did.

“All right then, you blue-arsed, buffalo-balled, piss-drinking skunk, then I’ll knock your f teeth out,” says my savior, and proceeded to do just that, with a mighty blow that swung from southeast to southwest, catching the whip-man where his big mouth hung, and his front choppers spewed out like a handful of corn amid a torrent of blood.

His friends carried him out directly, and the rest of the crowd was whistling and yelling: “Goddam, you
are
the hairy one, a real two-tit wonder,”
etc.
None of this meant nothing to me. Then the victor in that little scene leans over, uncinches the pack saddle from my belly, picks me up like a child, throws me over his shoulder as if I was a folded serape, and hikes on out of there.

The next thing I knowed is that I had been dropped into a horse trough outside, and that every time I tried to come up, a big hand pushed my head back into the water. So I figured, O.K. then I’ll drown if that’s what you want, for I didn’t have no will of my own any more. But when I was all set to draw a lungful of brackish water, I was suddenly pulled out again by my tormentor, clouted in the back two or three times, put up onto his shoulder again, hauled up a narrow stair, into a room, and throwed onto a brass bed.

Then I got my first good look at this stranger, for he took off his hat and his long red hair fell out of where it had been poked into the crown. Only it wasn’t a man but a woman. And she come then and set beside me on the bed.

And says: “I don’t know why I done this, little feller, but I go for you real strong. No sooner than I seed you crawling the floor, it come over me. I’m helpless for you, honey, worthless polecat that you are, and I a-goin’ to love you. You’re my own little man,” and so on.

I says: “Hold on there, Caroline. Don’t you recognize your brother Jack?” I had to say it several times, my voice being weak, before it took effect on her, for as she said she was real heavy for this mistaken idea of hern.

But at last her mouth fell open and she almost lost the plug of baccy she was chawing, and then said: “Oh my God.” Then: “You son of a bitch!” And then a few more choice oaths, for few could curse like my sister.

And finally she starts to cry and kisses and hugs me like kin, and fetches some water in a tin basin and washes off my filthy face and recognizes me for sure, and goes through it all again.

Well, I was glad to see old Caroline and even gladder to have someone care for me a bit, but after them months of dissipation and shame I didn’t have much energy and my mind was weak, so I soon fell to sleep.

Next day I felt real horrible and required whiskey merely to sustain
the breath of life itself, but Caroline wouldn’t allow me any, soaked me instead for hours in a tin tub they had in that house. All day and the next she soaked me, pouring in fresh kettles of boiling water whenever the tub got bearable to my hide, and when I finally emerged from this treatment I might have had the poison sweated from me but it took along with it the rest of my juice as well, and I had the rubber legs of a foal.

Caroline hadn’t changed much. Her features had coarsened up some, and she chawed tobacco always, which did not benefit her teeth; and though she washed regular as most, the smell of mule was right noticeable in her presence, for that was what she did for a living: drove a team, hauling out of Omaha for the Union Pacific Railroad, then a-building along the River Platte.

While I was still weak she related the story of her intervening experiences between the time she left me in Old Lodge Skins’s tepee and the present date. These I gather was varied and characterized by violent ups and downs, for I think you have the correct idea by now that Caroline was romantic as they come and thus ever being disappointed.

She had gone on farther west, been to San Francisco itself. That was where she had tried to hire on as seaman on a ship, but the crew thereof, they was quicker than the Cheyenne to discover her gender, and pitched her into the bay. I don’t know why Caroline could never get it through her thick head that the way to attract men was not to do what they did, but rather—no, I do know: she thought she was ugly, that’s why. Only she wasn’t. She wasn’t beautiful by a long shot, but she was nowhere near hideous, just had a strong cast of feature.

Well, she had got a better idea when the Civil War started and went East for that and took up nursing the wounded, at which I believe she must have been right good with her qualities of muscle and stamina added to a real feminine nature underneath. She sure liked men, that Caroline, no mistake about that; in fact, her troubles could be traced to the fervor of that taste. In time she fell in love with a man she met in a military hospital near Washington, D.C., which shows you how far east she ranged. He was not a casualty but rather a male nurse who worked alongside her, a real cultivated person who went so far as to write poetry in his spare time. According to Caroline, he was shy but she felt sure he returned her
feeling, for he give her some of his writings and it was full of burning passion and though he never come right out and admitted it to her face, she knowed she was the one he meant, and together they bathed and bandaged them poor devils, and the very suffering around them cemented their love for one another,
etc.

I see no need to go through the whole story, for the point is that when this fellow got to where he saw Caroline was in great sympathy with him, he confessed he was in love with a curly-headed little drummer boy what had got his rosy shoulder barked by a Minie ball. It had never occurred to that sister of mine to question why some big healthy man would be volunteering to carry bedpans when he could have been out fighting. I remember this individual’s name, but I ain’t going to mention it, for he got quite a reputation in later times for his robustious verse, some fellow told me once, and I wouldn’t want to sully no one’s pleasure in it, in case it’s still being read at this late date.

So much for Caroline, who had then brought her broken heart out West again and took up mule-skinning. She wasn’t embarrassed at all about mistaking me at first for a potential lover, having been hardened by her various troubles in that area. I reckon she figured now that the only way she would ever get a man was to carry him off as she did me.

I asked if she had ever in her travels run across any of the rest of our family.

“No, I never,” she says, throwing her boot across her knee and spitting a thin stream of tobacco juice into a spittoon the landlady furnished her with, “though I heerd from a soldier in the hospital that he served with a Bill Crabb who died a hero at Fredericksburg, and I reckon that was our little brother, God rest his soul.”