“Leastways they was already dead,” Dan says, and he tells me the worse thing he ever done was when they catched some Indians and the officer made them throw them live off of a cliff. “’Le’s listen at ’em yell!’ the officer shouts, but the Indians didn’t yell. The silence was awesome scary. Finally, the officer he begun yelling for them. YI-I-I-i-i-iee . . . And then we all did.”
His fort was on Lakota land and the tribe was cranky about it, so their warriors was forever attacking it, and Dan had shot and killed a few of them, but he warn’t bragging about it. “Of course they’re bothersome,” he says. “These lands was their’n and we’re bullying in and taking it all away from them. If they was doing that to us, we’d be bothersome, too.” I told him about hiring on to shoot buffalos up in these parts not long after the war was over, and he says he got ordered by a general to do that, too, but he didn’t like it.
“I didn’t neither,” I says. “It was like killing bedrolls. But it don’t matter, they was only cows.”
“No, they warn’t, Huck. We was killing the Indians. They can’t live without buffalo. They use them for food, clothes, their tepees, soap, plows, thread, ever blamed thing. They burn dried buffalo shit to stay warm in the winter. They use their skins, their bones, their skulls, their horns, even their guts and ballocks. The little Irisher general he says, ‘Kill the buffalo and you kill the Indians.’ And that’s what we was doing, the whole derned point of it.”
“Well, he’s a general, so I guess he knows.”
“I guess he don’t.”
When I told him about the Minnysota hangings and what the loony old preacher said, Dan says he was maybe crazy, but he was also brave, standing up like that against everybody else. “When you’re living with a mob of other people, it’s hard not to fall into thinking like as they do, and then you ain’t YOU no more. It’s like when you’re in the army. You could rightly say everybody else in that town was crazy except the preacher. When we burnt down that Missouri town and killt all them people, I felt like a cloud had come down and sucked me up into it and it warn’t me that was doing the awful things I done.”
I was learning a lot from Dan. He was younger’n me, but he knowed more. There was some in the fort, he says, who didn’t like him for the things he said. They called him an injun-lover. Some a them was wearing scalps on their belts and they liked to get him down and rub his face with them. “That ain’t the pleasantest thing, but it don’t change what’s true and what ain’t.” Tom he had a way of talking like the books he read that sometimes beflummoxed me, but what Dan said mostly made tolerable good sense even if he was a Jayhawker, and we started looking forward to my passing through the fort with one wagon train or nuther, so’s to set back and smoke and jabber into the night.
Dan didn’t have no appetite for the army life, and we reckoned we might ride together when he was freed out of it. I says we could go up into the northern hills where the fishing and hunting was prime, and Dan says maybe we could go exploring down the Colorado canyons where nobody ain’t never been before. We was full of notions like that and they was all smartly better’n the lives we was stuck in. Dan’s bulliest idea was to join a circus, where we could do bronco riding and fancy shooting and lassoing tricks. “We can even set up our own circus if we can’t find one’ll take us. We can get some Indians to join with us and we can have some pretend fights and then be friends after.” I was most excited by this notion and I begun practicing on the dogs and pigs at the fort.
But then one day, when I was guiding some wagons bringing supplies up the trail towards the fort, we got set upon by a passel of wild whooping Lakota warriors storming down on us, painted up like demons out from the Widow Douglas’s end-times Bible stories. We was overnumbered, so we abandoned the wagons, set off some gunpowder to back them off, jumped on our horses and humped it out a there, making straight for the fort, arrows flying about our ears and off our backsides and those of the horses. A garrison was sent out to drive off the war party and fetch the wagons back and the captain took Dan with him. Then, another patrol was sent out later to bring back the bodies.
I went to where Dan was laid out with the others. They was all shot up with arrows and scalped and tomahawked, and some was eating what before was betwixt their legs, a most gashly and grievous sight. The Lakota had fooled them by disappearing, then popping up again further on, beguiling them over and over till they was trapped too far from the fort for help. Dan’s chest and belly was full of arrows like a porkypine’s, but there warn’t no blood. It was like as if all their arrows had been shot into a dead man. Laying on his back. “If I don’t come back, they’ll say I was deserting and they hadn’t no choice,” he said. I could a turned him over to see if there were bullet holes in his back, but I didn’t do that. Other soldiers was watching me like they was considering over something, so I packed up that night and drifted back southards and took up the cowboying line, and not long after, found myself marching through the snow with General Hard Ass.
CHAPTER VII