Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (45 page)

“Madam, were you not nearly deranged by this same starvation?”

“Then what we both say is flimsy evidence, is it not? And if that is true, on what charge do you hold him?”

General Sibley sighed. “Scarlet Plume has admitted being present in Skywater during the massacre, just as certain captured members of Pounce’s band have testified.”

“Has he been tried yet?”

“The military commission is sitting now.” General Sibley pointed through the open flap of his tent toward one of the few remaining log buildings left after the fire. It was a cabin owned by François La Bathe. “His turn comes shortly.”

“What!”

“My dear lady. Listen to me now. White women of good family, whose word can be completely trusted, have told us of seeing their children nailed to trees while young braves practiced their marksmanship on them until they died. They have told us of white women being shot in the back so that the arrow came out by the point through the breast. They have told us of repeated sexual assaults at the hands of filthy bucks. One young white girl was ravished seventeen times within the hour. We have heard this sort of thing over and over again. The gravity of these hell-roaring times . . . Well! What do you wish us to do—excuse all these atrocities?”

Judith allowed herself an unladylike snort. “Within the hour, ha. Are you trying to tell me that that young girl really bothered to count all seventeen attacks? That she made a mark or a notch somewhere for each one? And watched the clock while it was being done to her?”

General Sibley’s face hardened. “As I say, when one hears of such dreadful things—yes, monstrous things—one’s blood is stirred to madness.”

“Hmmf. And I have heard the other side of that story. I have visited the Indian refuge camp here many times. One Indian mother told me with tears in her eyes that to save her children she’d had to go one hundred miles on foot to Fort Ridgely and degrade herself. Because she and her children were starving. She no longer could come up with milk for her baby. Her husband was dead and neither the annuities nor the food had yet arrived. This happened only a month before the uprising.”

“Oh, I know, I know, our hands are not altogether clean either. Yet, nevertheless—”

“—Not clean!” Judith sat with stiff, arched back on the edge of her chair. “General Sibley, was it honorable of you to invite the Indian chiefs to a council in a newly built log house and after they were assembled to imprison them? And promptly make a log jail out of the log house?”

“One cannot put trust in their word and it was for that reason that it was done.”

“General Sibley, I have also talked to our own white captive women many times. From them I hear that a good share of the atrocities done to them were done by our own soldiers, by some of those scavenger half-breed volunteers you have in camp. Also that it was our own whites who did most of the scalping and not the Indians. As it was always done. You know, of course, don’t you, that it was from the Dutch in New York that the American Indian learned scalping in the first place? Of course you do. Some of the Dutch were human bounty hunters.”

“What! Whoa. That I cannot believe.”

Judith burned her high-white flashing eyes into the general. “I can give you the names of the soldiers if you want them. Ha. What you hear from that scared-stiff nigger Godfrey and from those poor notional young girls is one thing, but what I hear at night from the older women and given to me in confidence is another.” Judith licked her lips. “White soldiers scalping the bodies of the dead. White dead.”

General Sibley pulled himself together. “The power of life and death is an awful thing to exercise. Lodged as it is in my hands for the moment, it makes me shudder. Still, duty must be performed and judgment visited on the guilty.”

“And I still say Scarlet Plume is not guilty. Not guilty, d’you hear? General Sibley, if you hang him, you hang an innocent man as well as a great man.” Judith shook her finger at General Sibley as a man might. “My fine sir, I’ll say it again. If he dies, you die. I will shoot you. Somehow.”

General Sibley turned to Heard. “Isaac, tell her what you told me this morning.”

Heard humped forward on his canvas chair. All through the interview his eyes as before had remained fastened on her doeskin tunic. It seemed to possess Heard that she had not wanted to change to white garb of some sort. “Yesterday one brave testified that he had seen a certain white killed by a white bullet. Since we knew for an absolute certainty that the white man had been killed by an arrow, we had him dead to rights. Your red lover shall hang.”

Judith couldn’t believe her ears. “And that is evidence? And you are a lawyer?”

“Nevertheless—”

Judith broke in. She turned her full fury on General Sibley. “Sir, you have caught the wrong Indians. The real culprits, if there were any, have long ago skipped the country. They are already in British Canada.”

General Sibley’s eyes first opened a second, then almost closed entirely. He had spotted something. She had made a slip. “Mrs. Raveling, you do not protest when Scarlet Plume is referred to as your red lover? Then it is a fact, is it not, that you are infatuated with him, eh? Possibly more?”

Judith flushed scarlet.

There was a long pause. In Heard’s eyes and in the expression on his lips it was patently obvious that he was envisioning her in lascivious embrace with Scarlet Plume.

General Sibley spoke, almost sadly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Raveling, but your dusky paramour must be tried along with the rest. We must do this to make absolutely certain that not one of the real culprits goes unpunished. We are bound to have a few culprits amongst all those we’ve caught. We owe this to the bones of all the slaughtered white settlers.”

“General Sibley, let me ask you this. I have heard the story many times that a Sioux chief, in gratitude for a favor you did him, once offered you his virgin daughter for the night. In fact, I think you referred to it in an article you wrote for the magazine
Spirit of the Times
, under the pseudonym ‘Hal, a Dakotah.’ Did you actually refuse her charms?”

General Sibley blushed.

“Did your pet of a white wife approve of this when you told her?”

Judith was not permitted to testify, on the grounds of prejudice.

She caught General Sibley by the arm as the military commission broke up for the noon meal. Her face was blackened over by all the flying soot from the burned grass. Tear streaks down her face resembled Indian face markings.

“General Sibley?”

“They found him guilty.”

Judith almost fell to earth.

General Sibley caught her arm, supported her for a moment.

“But, General, he is innocent!”

“So say you.”

“What did he say in his defense?”

“He gave no defense. He freely admits to being at Skywater during the time of the massacre. He told us that he was proud to be able to say that there was no one between himself and the enemy at all times.”

“Poor man. Poor man. He just will not try to save himself.”

“When he was asked if he would try to help catch some of the other culprits, so that some amelioration of his sentence might be considered, he told us”—General Sibley could not help but smile grimly—“he told us we could skin our own skunk.”

“He would say that. He would.”

“I realize, Mrs. Raveling, that there is much to be said for the romantic noble savage—”

“Romantic? The Sioux is not romantic at all. He is epic!”

“Mrs. Raveling, I agree with you in one respect at least: that this is the greatest Indian tragedy of the age.”

“Did that blue-gum nigger presume to testify against him?”

“He did not. Godfrey the Negro is married into another branch of the Sioux.”

“General Sibley.” Judith gave him a hard tug on the sleeve. “General Sibley, we stole this land from the Indian. It was their homeland, not ours. And whatever they may have done in retaliation to regain it, even the worst, can be excused on that ground. We would have done the same.”

“Then you do not believe that a superior civilization has the duty and the right to make a place for itself?”

“At the expense of the dumb? I do not believe there is such a thing as justifiable conquest.”

“What about the civilizing the world has undergone at the hands of the Romans?”

Judith thought again of the snub given her by Mrs. Sibley. “I’ve read some too, General. So let me ask you this. Do you then condone the repeated raids the civilized Spaniards made on the Indian Mayas, when the Indian Mayas had the greater civilization?”

It was a telling comment, and it was immediately apparent that General Sibley’s respect for her went up a hundredfold. A mingled look of part sympathy and part apprehension appeared in his dark eyes. He looked at her soot-darkened flowing gold hair, looked at her Indian tunic, and shook his head. “Madam, you almost persuade me.”

“Almost is not enough.”

General Sibley took her by the arm. “I’m glad you caught me here though. Because I was about to go look for you myself. Uhh, come with me to my quarters a moment. I have someone there who wants to meet you.”

Judith started. Some more survivors from Skywater?

“Come.”

When they arrived at General Sibley’s field tent, the General bowed her inside and then stepped back.

His ushering her alone into the murky tent surprised her. But then her eyes adjusted and she understood.

Rising out of Heard’s chair was her soldier husband, Vince.

“What . . . are . . . you . . . doing . . . here?” Judith asked weakly.

“My precious pet.”

Vince’s ready use of the old endearment, always so revolting to her because it reminded her of his favorite Lucretius position, almost broke her mind. She sagged into a chair.

He stood proudly before her. He was dressed in the snapping blue uniform of a lieutenant, with belt and saber, the quintessence of everything military and manly. He bowed to her, forager cap to his breast and thinning blond hair neatly slicked back.

Judith closed her eyes. This was not the way she remembered him when he left for the wars, waving to her from the deck of the steamboat
Blue Earth
. He had been craven then, half-drunk, potbellied, sallow.

“Well, pet?”

She shivered.

“Judith?”

She dared to look up. How radiant he was with health now, slim at the hips, broad-shouldered. Bold-eyed, even. The war of rebellion had made a man of him. At last. Slowly her eyes went over him. She saw that he had been wounded, a deep bullet crease at the edge of his hairline. She could see blood pulsing in the soft white scarred hollow.

“Pet?”

“Too late,” she murmured, weak.

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

She shook her head. Vince was now the man she had once wanted him to be. But it was too late.

His smile gave him the look of the eager young lover. “I see that you’ve been through a lot too.”

“Too?” she thought.

“This has been a terrible time for all of us.”

“Angela is dead,” she whispered.

His face quickly grayed over. For a second his face had the old sallow look. “Yes,” he finally said, low. “I know. General Sibley told me.” He licked his thin lips.

“She was—”

“Don’t mention it! I know. What is done is done.” He forced a smile to his lips. “I think we owe it to ourselves to concentrate on what lies ahead, not on what lies behind us.” He looked at her Indian tunic. “Native garb becomes you.”

She covered her face with her hands. “Please.”

He spoke gently. “Soon we’ll be in Mankato. We’ll buy you a whole new wardrobe there.”

“Please.”

A long silence followed.

A sentry outside paced slowly back and forth. A bugle sounded. Faintly came the endless wailing of the Sioux death song. A sad Dakota war drum beat steady and slow nearby.

Vince sat down opposite her. Elbows on his knees, he began to talk in a low voice. It was strange to hear the new manly accent in his talk. In the old days it was she who did most of the talking. The new vibrancy in him cut her up inside.

After a bit she managed to fasten her mind on what he was saying. . . .

All went well with Vince in the Minnesota Fifth under Colonel Hubbard. Until the battle of Farmington.

It was in May and the hills were in bloom. Vince was made adjutant to Captain Bowman, a rough old file of a man. In the opening skirmish the captain lost his saber and he ordered Vince to go back and get it. Vince was a coward, and knew it, and demurred. He suggested the lost saber was hardly worth a human life. In a rage Captain Bowman ordered him to get it anyway. Vince was more afraid of the captain than he was of the Rebs. Luckily a lull occurred in the shooting just then and he ran back over the ridge and found the saber. When he turned it in, the captain ordered him back once more.

“What for?”

“Why, the gold cord, of course, that’s what for. Can’t let the Rebs have that.”

The cord was worth about ten cents and this time Vince knew for a fact that going back was not worth a Union life. Vince spoke his mind on the matter.

The captain chewed him out. And chewed him out with such maniacal fury that Vince began to wonder if the captain wasn’t a fit subject for the lunacy commission.

Vince went again. He had proceeded about a dozen yards over the ridge, stepping over gutted bellies, when the Rebels let go with a barrage from the far crest. One of the musket balls carried away Vince’s right heel. Vince jumped straight up, screamed, and returned to the Union lines at 2:40 gait.

Vince hugged the first tree he came to. “I hugged it so hard that had it been an old maid she would have wiggled in sheer delight.”

The captain came up and kicked him in the arse. “What the devil you doing here?”

Vince waved his arms up and down on both sides of the tree. “Why, captain, I’m only feeling for a furlough. One little nick from a musket ball on a fingertip and I can go home.”

The captain was outraged. He kicked him with all he had a second time. “I never want to see your detestable carcass again in this regiment. You are not only a coward, you are an outright all-day-Sunday coward. They surely left out the sand when they made you.”