Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

Автор книги: Томас Бергер (Бри(е)джер)

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

Custer had also shot such dogs as didn’t run with the fleeing Indians, and them little bodies was strewn about amidst spent shells and arrows and the other litter. Considerable blood had spattered upon snow and earth, and when in shadow it froze bright red, soaking in and browning only where in sunlight.

Of the several hundred souls that occupied the place of late, I alone stayed quick. I set down upon the cold bank of the Washita. Though the river had earlier known some blood, them red bursts and filaments never last long in a flowing stream but join the mix and move on, and someplace a thousand miles away a fellow will drink himself some water and unbeknownst imbibe a particle of somebody else’s juice of life. The sun was falling behind a blue ridge of smoke fringed with gold, like a sash hung across the western sky. You might have said that Custer flew his personal colors even on the horizon.

I wasn’t setting there in self-pity, mind you, nor anger. I was just trying to figure it out. Circumstances seemed to disintegrate upon me shortly after I had got settled in them. I was twenty-six years of age, yet as I could recall, this here was the first time I could ever locate the source of my troubles in one individual.

I would have lived in that camp on the Washita throughout the winter, and when the new grass come up in the spring we would have broken the treaty and moved north, got us buffalo and Pawnee en route, and maybe run one of them antelope surrounds again if Old Lodge Skins was up to it and if the railroad hadn’t scared away all the game, and so on up to the Powder River for some good fights with the Crow, and bear hunts and lodgepole-cutting in the Bighorn Mountains. All the while I’d have had them four women tending to my every little wish.

I seen General Custer as responsible for my loss. And I didn’t yet know how nor where I would do it, but I decided to kill that son of a bitch.

CHAPTER 19 To the Pacific and Back

WHAT BECOME OF SUNSHINE? If I couldn’t find her body she must have got away; probably waited till the cavalry had swept past the lodge, then slipped out and made it to the bluffs. She was a resourceful and resolute woman, and better than me at that sort of endeavor.

An Indian was more suited in mind and spirit for taking this type of beating than me. Here was I, aiming to kill Custer on the one hand; and on the other, I also decided I could never again live with the Cheyenne, for the simple reason that I couldn’t afford to undergo another massacre on the losing end.

Darkness fell while I was still setting there on the banks of the Washita, plotting murder. It had got monstrous cold, and me covered only with a flannel shirt and cavalry jacket. The troopers had looted every blanket and robe in the village, beyond what they burned, for they had left their overcoats and haversacks back where they started their charge that morning, and the Cheyenne had circled round and got that stuff. Talk of having no weapon-I must first find some protection for my own hide or the weather would do me in before I put a blade in Custer’s.

So I went to what was left of them lodges where the captives had been gathered. Luckily, a little hunk of one tepee skin had not been altogether burned. So I beat out where it was still smoldering and wrapped myself in it. Buffalo hide it was, with the hair scraped off, so afforded none too great a warmth. And not only was it cold in that place, but the moon come out and shone across that field of pony corpses, and now the coyotes had got to them and I also saw the big ghostly shapes of the gray wolf, a nasty creature, and the noise of them fangs tearing at limp flesh and the growls and whines was quite unpleasant.

I just had to start a fire, for the sight of so much carrion gives a wolf the confidence to take on something living. I was scraping among the ashes of the tepees, trying to find a coal still burning, when I heard the sound of horses coming from downriver. Custer had carried out his bluff, you see, threatening the villages in that direction so the Indians would strike them and run without hitting him; then he turned and come back.

Wolves, coyotes, and me melted away. I don’t know where the vermin went: I retired into the brush, and more listened to than watched the column troop through the razed village. Then, after the rear guard had passed, I fell in a quarter-mile behind and followed them at this interval some hours up the valley of the Washita to where they finally made camp. Oh, but it was a cold and barren march for me, the desolation adding to the temperature. My only solace was that them troops dwelt in a similar predicament as to the weather. But they had comrades in misery, whereas my recent partners was dead or dispersed.

Soon they lighted great bonfires which illuminated the riverbottom. Well, I could just as soon cut Custer’s throat after I singed my shanks a little, I thought. Indeed, without so doing it wasn’t likely I could lift my knife for the shivering. So I snuck through the picket line and pushed up close through the throng about one blaze.

Some soldier wrapped in an Indian blanket says: “You ain’t got a chaw?” I shook my head. The reflection of the flames flickered in his blear-eyes. He says: “Wasn’t that a brilliant idea of Hard Ass’s to leave the packs and overcoats behind? I reckon he’ll get another medal for that.”

A fellow on my other side says: “I don’t doubt he kept his own overcoat and a side of bacon which his striker is frying up at this minute.”

“Custer’s luck, hey boys?” This come from the blear-eyed fellow, and someone else said hush or Hard Ass would hear him.

“Screw him,” says Blear Eyes. “What’s he gonna do, put me on half rations?”

The other soldier says: “He’ll have a hole dug right through the snow and throw you in it, boy.”

“He will?” I asks, trying to seem a natural part of this group.

“Will he? You must be a recruit or you’d know he done the very thing on the campaign a year ago last summer. Ask Gilbert,” nodding at a long, thin soldier with a crooked nose and a growth of whiskers who was rubbing his skinny hands towards the fire. This man says: “Yeah, we was in the field and he never had no guardhouse. Some of us boys showed up late for call, so he had this hole dug in the ground, thirty foot square, maybe fifteen deep, and throwed us in, then put boards acrost it. Fierce hot it was under the sun, and there was too many of us to lay down all at once.”

“Then Hard Ass himself goes over the hill to see his old lady,” Blear Eyes says. “Runs right off an Indian campaign. And you know all that happened to him? Suspended from command for one year, and he goes back to Michigan and spends it fishing.”

Gilbert says: “I don’t condemn the bastard for running back to his woman, much as I hate him, for there’s a pretty piece of fluff.”

“That right?” says I. I was fair warmed now and beginning to plot my course.

“Oh my yes. You ain’t never seen Miz Custer? I tell you when you do you’ll howl and lay down and lick the dirt, boy, and go to bed next night with Rosy Palm and her five sisters. That’s the difference between a general and a private. Hey, who’s for going over to the prisoners and getting us an old squaw?”

The conversation degenerated from that point on, as you might expect if you know anything about an army, and I edged off and proceeded across the campground. If I was going to assassinate Custer, I first had to locate him without arousing suspicion, which was not easy, since six or seven hundred soldiers was present and I was not tall enough to see over anybody’s head.

The Cheyenne captives had an area and a couple small fires to themselves, and they was now so many silent blanket-rolls upon the earth, the children wrapped right in with their mothers: nothing keeps a redskin from his sleep. Down a ways beyond that, their ponies was herded, with a wide separation between them and the cavalry horses, who the Indian animals make nervous.

I made quite a scout of that bivouac, which was spread out and well lighted by the enormous cottonwood fires; and with the men cold and tired and hungry, what a slaughter could have been managed by fifty Indians. But the tribe had been whipped and then tricked, and anyway they never fought at night. Custer could just as well have pulled in his guards. Only one active enemy lurked in that area.

That was me, and by a process of elimination I found him at last. The officers had their fire at the base of a little knoll, but the General wasn’t there, he was by himself on top of the slight eminence. He had his own little blaze, and was seated on the ground alongside it, writing by its yellow light. Occasionally his striker, that is the orderly who done his servant-work, would come up and put a new log on the flames, which he had got from a detail of poor devils who was kept cutting wood in the timber all night and hauling it into camp.

So on one of their trips in with a load, I joined these last and helped them stack logs, which they did not question, and watched for Custer’s striker to come over for a supply, which he finally done just before my back was broke.

“How’s the General?” I says. Now I must explain that the type of fellow who takes that job has got the personality to suit it. He helps his master dress, serves his master’s food, and digs his master’s latrine, and for all I know wipes his master’s behind. But sucking up to one man satisfies his appetite, and to all others he is extra-snotty.

“Don’t you worry about that,” says he. “Just give me two of them middle-sized logs.”

“I was thinking he must be plumb wore out.”

He give a sneering laugh. “You will never see the time when the General can’t run any man in this outfit into the ground. He only went into camp now on account of the likes of you. He don’t need no sleep nor food. Whipping one tribe of Indians only gives him the taste for another.”

I says: “I seen he was writing something.”

“Yes,” says the striker. “That would be a letter to his Lady. He writes her most every day.” There wasn’t no postal boxes on the plains at that time, so when Custer mailed them letters he had to send some scout through a couple hundred mile of savage wilderness. I had yet to hear a thing about that man that didn’t gall me like a cactus burr.

But just about the time I thought I had got this worm’s confidence, he suddenly stops and squints suspiciously.

“Say, have you got an eye on my job?”

“Not me,” I hastens to say. “No sir, I admit I am too dumb for it. But I tell you, I am right fascinated by heroes. I guess that’s because I am kind of yellow myself. I near pissed my pants on that charge this morning, and the only thing that kept me going was the sight of the General up there ahead, his hair streaming in the wind and his arm waving us on.” I put this watery, worshipful look on my face, and he swallowed it.

“Well,” he says, “you want to carry this wood for me? I reckon it’s O.K. if you come along to the bottom of the hill, where you can look up at him. And that’s a favor I wouldn’t give to any of the rest of these scum.”

“Listen,” says I, gritting my teeth with another feeling than that which he took it for, “it’s worth a month’s pay to me to actually go on up and put the wood on the fire near that noble individual.”

He was first scandalized at this suggestion, but after a good bit of talk and my signing an IOU, with a false name, to hand him over thirteen dollars at the next payday, which is what a private earned per month, I gained the privilege of carrying the wood alone to the top of the hill, sticking it into the fire, and coming immediately back thereafter.

We set out for the knoll, and upon reaching the bottom of it, he stayed there and I mounted the slope with my two logs. Them griping soldiers had been wrong: Custer wasn’t wearing no overcoat, and he had even laid his hat beside him and loosened the top of his shirt. Of course he was right close to the warm fire. His hair and mustache was golden in the light. He never looked up from the paper, supported upon an order book, which he was covering with line after line of fluent script, occasionally dipping his pen into a little ink bottle, then flinging the excess drops hissing into the flames.

I poked a log into the embers, with my back towards the striker at the foot of the slope, so he wouldn’t see my other hand go beneath the jacket to the hilt of my knife. Some sparks went up the pink smoke stream towards the open black heavens. Custer did not raise his head, for to do so he would have had to change the angle at which his noble profile took the light. He was posing here quite as much as he had done when striding about the Cheyenne camp that morning. Then he was “General in the Field”; now, “Soldier at the End of Day.”

It’s funny how a man with Custer’s personality could influence that of his would-be murderer, but I was seeing myself in various illustrations: knife raised over unsuspecting general, him with his halo of golden locks, me with teeth bared, and so on through a series that ended with “Assassin at Bay.”

Who knows how much time I wasted on them childish visions. If you set out to kill, leave your imagination at home. Reality should suffice, at least if you’re white.

For what happened now was that Custer spoke.

Still scratching away with his nib, his eyes to the paper, he says: “I’ll take a cup of coffee now.”

Maybe I simply lost my guts at that moment; maybe I never did have the stomach to slaughter a man in cold blood, but what I have always thought to be the case was that the trustin Custer’s voice saved his life at that moment and so changed the course of history. Call me coward, but I wasn’t able to slit the throat of a man while he was writing to his wife and fixing to drink coffee.

So the assassin answers slavishly: “Yes, sir,” and goes down the knoll to where that striker is waiting.

“Get up there on the double,” I says. “The General wants you to give him a bath.”

I don’t believe I have to take you along every inch of my route when leaving the Seventh Cavalry-for I did leave them that very night, in the dead of winter, and struck out alone across the wilderness. I had to. I had not given up my resolution. I was going to kill Custer sometime, but first I had to get away from him for a while. Nor could I stand to be in the proximity of them captive Cheyenne. And going downriver to the still free Indians was equally unthinkable. I had had it, right up to here.

I was going back to the settlements and get me some money, I didn’t care how or where, and buy a frock coat, a brocaded vest, and a pearl-handled revolver. And dressed like that on one fine day, I would encounter General Custer a-strolling with his Lady through the streets of some town, Topeka, say, or Kansas City, for I knowed he liked his cities-oh, I found out more about him than I have said: he liked fine restaurants and theatricals, knew New York City, even, like the palm of his hand; so said his striker.

“My compliments to your Lady, sir,” I would say, and then beg a private word with him, and we would step aside while his pretty Mrs. stood there simpering under her parasol. Then, “Sir,” I would say, “you are a son of a bitch.” And of course as a gentleman he would demand satisfaction, so the next scene was upon the prairie at dawn, our backs together, take ten paces forward, turn, and fire, then him upon the ground, a spreading red stain coming through his embroidered buttonholes. “Sir,” he says to me with his dying breath, “you are the better man.”

Then I’d dig a cold root out of the frozen ground with a pointy stick and gnaw on it, or pack more leaves as insulation between my shirt and jacket, and trudge on. I soon lost track of time. In fact, I went right out of my head and don’t know why I survived at all. I seen nothing but a mass of white, like I was in the middle of a desert of cotton. It was snow of course, blizzards, but I don’t recall it as cold, for I had got to the condition where I was more affected by textures than temperature, and it was all I could do to refrain from laying right down and going to sleep forever.

I guess I finally give in to the urge. I had been moving almost due east, having struck the Cimarron and stayed on it: in delirium you will follow almost anything that seems to know where it’s going. So what I was doing was to cross Indian Territory horizontally rather than proceeding north to Kansas which I had intended, and I reckon I had reached the edge of the Creek Nation when I just flopped down in a white prairie that looked like one big bed.

When I woke up, I was in the log-cabin home of Creek Indians. The man of the family had come across me while hunting and brung me in, and these kindly folk, him and his wife and several youngsters, they nursed and fed me, and give me clothes to replace that blue uniform now in shreds. The Creek was Georgia redskins who was whipped by Andy Jackson, and not long afterward, the Government forced them out of their native country to go and live west of Arkansas, same as they did the Choctaw, Cherokee, and others. But these tribes was right civilized, had them log cabins, wore white type of clothes, did farming, and before the war they had even kept Negro slaves of their own.

I stayed with them Creek until the spring of ’69. After I recovered, I done some hunting to pay my keep, and I helped out with the spring planting, and while I was sure glad to lend them people a hand, I proved to myself I was like a Cheyenne when it came to farming.

Actually, though, that civilized life in the eastern Nations was more dangerous than you might think from a look at them peaceful little farms thereabout. That Creek family, seeing my blue uniform, took me for a deserter, a common type in the Nations. And liked me for it, because they had old cause against the Army from the time of Jackson, and then during the War most of the Creek had been Reb sympathizers, which is a laugh considering how they had been kicked out of Georgia, but what they liked about the South was slavery. Anyway, when the War was done, the Federal Government punished them, and the Choctaw, Cherokee, etc., by taking away the western half of Indian Territory, which had earlier belonged to them tribes, and making it into reservations for such as the Cheyenne. From which followed in natural progression the Battle of the Washita.

What I started to say, though, was that there was considerable Army deserters in the eastern Nations, along with freed slaves who now didn’t have no work, and former Reb soldiers in a similar situation, and Indians what had gone bad, also fugitives from justice back in the States, bully-boys, cutthroats, and just plain rotten fellows. There was in addition every sort of breed in them parts: some being part white, Negro, and Indian all at the same time, with the worst traits of each.

I said it was dangerous living in that part of the country even though you kept to your cabin and cornfield, for gangs of the foregoing was always riding about and murdering people. It was a specially good place to practice that profession, for there wasn’t any local law to speak of. Generally, if you rubbed out a person you hadn’t nobody to get after you but a Federal marshal out of Fort Smith or Van Buren over in Arkansas, where the court was, and they wasn’t active much at this time because the court people had all been Rebel and thus got the boot with the war. A saying went “There ain’t no Sunday west of St. Louie and no God west of Fort Smith.”

Now the center for the rough element was a town in the eastern Creek Nation called Mooskokee, which was where I proceeded upon leaving that family what had befriended me, with a view to getting the stage there and so travel up to Kansas and thence take the Union Pacific out to end-of-track, find Caroline and Frank Delight and cash in my third of our hauling business, for as I have said I needed money. In any event, I could always borrow a bundle off of Frank, for he would now be my brother-in-law.

I walked it to Mooskokee, about forty mile. I didn’t have a cent for stage fare, but over my shoulders I was toting a pack of raccoon skins that I expected to sell once in town, for they make a serviceable cap. Indeed I was wearing one. Well sir, I had reached what I took to be the outlying suburbs, a long muddy hog wallow, lined with ramshackle sties, and I saw an old colored man there, looking for his pigs, and says: “Uncle, could you direct me to the city of Mooskokee?”

He scratches through the sweat-rag on his head and answers: “You has already got almost clear through it.”

“I was just a-looking for the stage line.”

“The station,” he says, “is up the street and around the corner. But if I was you I’d hold off going there at present, for it is in the process of getting robbed, I do believe.”

Sure enough, no sooner had he spoke than a volley of shots sounded from where he pointed and directly a body of men on horseback come tearing around the corner and galloped towards us and would have run us down had we not rolled into a slough alongside the road. I don’t know what was their hurry, for they had nobody chasing them. Somebody had shot the sheriff yesterday, my acquaintance pointed out as we drug ourselves from the mud.

I thanked him and went down to the stage station, which I figured was safe enough now. The agent was lying in a pool of gore, and great holes gaped in the thin board walls where a fellow had been mighty free with a shotgun. Well, I was standing just inside what was left of the place, thinking how it didn’t make much difference to me, on account of I didn’t have the price of a ticket yet anyway, when I heard the noise of horses outside and in busts three very nasty-looking customers, bristling with firearms.

These fellows glare at me with their red eyes and then take in that body of the dead agent, and the one who seemed their leader says to the others: “Told you we was goin’ to be late. Now this no-good bastard has done beat us.”

Then he says to me with hurt pride: “We got the one before, and we would of beat you here this evenin’ hadn’t we been occypied down the road a piece with the stage itself. We robbed it and we burned it and we kilt the driver, we kilt the guard, we kilt the passengers, but one of them was a gal, and so we all _____ her before we kilt her.”

As I say, I never had the price of a fare, anyway. What concerned me at the moment, however, was my lack of a gun, which these skunks would soon notice and then I would join the stiff on the floor. I had to make the most of my time while they was still jealously admiring how they thought I had rubbed out the agent.

“My boys won’t like that,” I says. “They was fixing to get that stage themselves, and I reckon have found it by now and turned back and will want to meet them who stole their thunder.”

“How many boys you got?” says the leader. If he ever would introduce a drop of water to his face, he might have come out fairly good-looking. He was a breed of Indian and white, with fairish hair and thin features but walnut-colored skin. Another was almost black, with straight raven hair gathered in a knot behind. The third looked pure white but was the ugliest mortal I ever seen: had a bad eye, and an old knife cut that when healing had lifted his lip on the right side so you could see his teeth there even when he wasn’t grinning or snarling though it seemed as if he always was.

“Nineteen or twenty,” says I, and turned away right insolent, upon which I knowed they would make up their mind to shoot me in the back or knuckle under. It turned out they was bluffed, for the leader commences to boast.

“I guess you have heerd of me,” he says; “Johnny Jump? I got me quite a rep hereabout for murder and mayhem. Ain’t no marshal ever laid a hand on me, though many have tried. Just last month I blowed the head off one come out of Van Buren. This yeer’s my cousin, Jim Smoker”-pointing to the black-faced fellow-“and the other we call Cockeye. He ain’t got no tongue. Had it shot or tore out. Can’t talk, but my God he is mean.”

I says: “I never heard of you small-time trash. We’re from St. Louie by way of Texas and have just stopped off in this mudhole to get tobacco money. And then on to Kansas, where we figure to cut and shoot and rob and violate from one side of the state to the other.”

Cockeye grunts some and slobbers out of his cut lip. Jim Smoker goes on outside and in a minute I hear him firing his rifle and look out and see he is taking target practice at the curly tail of a wandering hog.

“My cousin,” says Johnny Jump, “ain’t got all his buttons, but he is real useful at killin’ and stealin’. I was a-thinking maybe us fellows could join your boys. I would shore like to rob and murder and the rest of what you said up in Kansas.” He looked like a kid who was begging his Daddy to take him fishing, his eyes bright and wistful. There was something real innocent about Johnny Jump, even likable, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the Indian in him.

In at last reluctantly agreeing to admit him and his boys to my nonexistent gang, I did not intend to travel in their company any further than was necessary. I told them I was to rendezvous with my bunch twenty miles north. They could come along at their own risk.

I pretended my horse had strayed somewheres, so Johnny Jump lent me an extra animal they had took from the stage. I still didn’t have no gun, though. We rode till twilight, and then I pointed at a grove of trees and said that was the place my boys would be or come to later, and so we stopped and built a fire and ate some bacon and beans from a bag of loot they had, for as they went about the countryside this bunch would kill anyone they met and take whatever he was carrying. In fact, we had passed a little farm on this trip, and I only had kept them from pillaging it by promises of the mayhem we all would wreak after collecting the rest of my boys.

I didn’t notice that Jim Smoker had dropped behind, for he rode always in back anyway, but he was gone when we went into the grove and only showed up later while we was feeding. He wore a different hat and carried two bottles of whiskey and led another horse behind his, to which was lashed all manner of booty: bags of sugar and corn, blankets, coal-oil lamps, and even a little footstool.

Johnny Jump spoke to him in Creek and then laughs hee-haw. “My cousin just had to drap by that place we went past back a piece. He cain’t resist a thang, being a chile at heart.”

I was sorry for the poor folk what had lived on that farm, but I guess they was out of pain now, and the way it turned out, the ill wind that blowed them a sudden death saved my life. For I couldn’t have kept up the pretense of meeting my gang beyond the following morning and would have gone under for sure. But what happened instead was that Johnny Jump and Jim Smoker shared them bottles of whiskey, and after Johnny got a bellyful of liquor he commenced to turn sentimental. It seemed he was a poet in addition to an outlaw, and setting there beside the fire, with tears running down his cheeks to mingle with the whiskey leaking over his chin, he recited verse of his own composition.

The darlin’ love of all my life,

In women I never had no other,

The sweetest thang in this vale of strife,

Was always my dear Mother.

And now she is in heaven

Where the angels play them harps,

For in years it is six or seven

Since I laid away her carpse.…

There was ten or twenty more stanzas to it, which I don’t remember no more, and when he gets through he lets out a great howl of agony and picks up his rifle and shoots Jim Smoker between the eyes. Then he gives Cockeye a couple in the spine where he lays sleeping, and finally empties the rest of the magazine of his sixteen-shot Henry into the blanket roll topped by the coonskin cap which I had earlier arranged to represent myself.

After which he lays back and goes peaceful to sleep. I come back from behind the tree where I had watched all this, picked up the Henry he had dropped, got me the two best Colt’s in the bunch and all the horses, and left, heading north. I considered putting a bullet into Johnny Jump’s head and so do a lot of his future victims a favor, but in addition to my dislike for cold-blooded murder, I had developed a soft spot for him. It might have been on account of that poetry.

The next couple years I spent in transit, mainly looking for Caroline and Frank Delight, so as to get some money from them, for as I have said, I couldn’t go kill Custer as broke as I was. What I had not known when down in the Nations was that the U.P. had reached Utah and linked up with the Central Pacific around the time I left the Creek family with whom I spent the winter of ’69. The railroad was done building, that is, having spanned the continent. But with the proceeds from selling Johnny Jump’s little horse herd, which I had drove to Topeka without further incident, I rode the coaches on out west from Omaha, anyway, figuring my relations might have settled their saloon business in one of the towns that had sprung up along the line.

At every station I inquired for Caroline and Frank, with no result, but I had always wanted to take a look at San Francisco anyway, so rode on out there, by when I was sure glad to get off the railroad for a spell. That transcontinental road was a wonder of civilization no doubt, but what with stopovers I had been riding them lurching cars for a week and had swallowed an awful lot of smoke and ashes as they blowed in the open windows, and every now and again a live spark would start a little fire in the green plush seat-upholstery or someone’s clothes. However, they said the train went twenty-five miles an hour, and I don’t doubt it.

I wasn’t in San Francisco long before I run out of my money, for everything was terrible expensive. You couldn’t get a decent meal for less than fifty cents. And I don’t know why, but them hills the town was built on commenced to depress my spirits: you feel great upon the summit, but then you always have to come down sometime and when you do, it’s like you been demoted. I had lived too long on the flat.