In my desperate low-spiritedness, I’d took up some of Pap’s habits, so when I warn’t on a horse I was likely in a saloon if there was one about, and there most surely was, for they was common as sagebrush. They was rough but easeful places where a body could generly find a plate of hot biscuits and bacon and maybe a loose woman or two, which I’d come to appreciate in my lazy and nonnamous but mostly grateful way. And one night in a saloon up at the northest end of the Chisholm Trail, after I’d just been paid off by the cattle ranchers and turned loose for the winter, a drunk army officer holding up the bar beside me set to blowing round about his general, calling him a mean low-down poltroon who didn’t give a hang about his troops, who wore out them and their horses till they all got sick and died whilst he was kissing bigwigs’ behinds and perfuming himself and chasing the ladies. “When his own soldiers got ambushed by savages, he warn’t even man enough to go back and try and rescue them!” he roared out with his fist in the air, and then his eyes crossed and he keeled over, busting his head on the bar as he dropped.
His friends come over and dragged him away. “Delirium tremenjus,” one of them says, a scraggly little chap in fringed buckskin and pinned-up slouch hat. He picked up the drunk’s beer and finished it off, then with a twitchy wink stuffed a plug in his whiskers. This gent, who called himself Charlie, says he’s a scout for that selfsame general, and when he asks what I was doing in this hellbegot town, I says I’d just rode in with a herd of beeves. “So you’re prob’bly out of a job,” Charlie says, knowing all about it. “Our wrangler at the fort catched the choler and ain’t no more, so they’re a-looking fur somebody new. You any good with hosses?” I told him what I could do, but also that I warn’t interested in nothing to do with soldier types, and he nodded and spit a brown gob on the dirt floor and squshed it with his boot and bought me a beer and struck a lucifer to light my clay pipe by and somehow, one thing stumbling along after t’other, there I was next day in an army corral trying to set a rumbustious young mustang. Tom is always living in a story he’s read in a book so he knows what happens next, and sometimes it does. For me it ain’t like that. Something happens and then something else happens, and I’m in trouble again.
This time the trouble come from the dandified curly-haired general with the red silk noose at his throat, watching me bust the bronc. The horse was a wild mustang with a white star in his forehead and a long thick tail that swopped the dirt when he reared. His belly was swoll from the free grazing life, the difficultest trick being to cinch the saddle round him, but I had him roped and hobbled and snubbed to a corral post, so in the end he didn’t have no choice. When he was bridled and saddled, I freed him from the ropes and, twisting his ear to keep his mind off of ought else, grabbed the saddle horn and sprung aboard. He was a feisty cretur and done what he could to buck me off him, but I finally wore him down and rode him to a standstill. The general nodded like I done what I was s’posed to do and says to get some horses ready, we was going to take them for a walk.
It was already darkening up into an early night, and Charlie had just come riding in to declare a snowstorm rolling our way—“Like dark angels on the warpath!” he says—so I warn’t sure I’d heard the general rightly. But he was soon back and a-setting his horse in his bearskin coat and shiny calvary boots, and he fetched out his sword and stabbed the low sky with it and give the order and we all slung on a cartridge belt and marched off into the blow. I was still on the pony I’d broke, so I left Jackson in the stables so’s Star, as I’d come to call him, could work off some of his excess belly. He was still a-quivering like he’d catched a fever, but he did not reject my company.
That night I learnt why his troops called him General Hard Ass. We was marched all night through a power of swirling snow and nobody warn’t happy. It was so cold, a body couldn’t think two thoughts in a row. The troopers I was riding with was a hard lot, with every other word a cussword and scalps of all sizes strung from their belts like fish on a trot-line. They liked to brag what they done to the native ladies before they took their hair off. Or whilst they was taking it off. Some of them was former runaway-slave hunters, now chasing down natives whilst still lynching ex-slaves whenever they could snatch one in the neighborhood. There warn’t no bounty profit in ex-slaves no more. They said they done it for honor. Which is about the worse reason for doing whatever except, maybe, passing wind.
The officers was all riding up front with the general, so the troopers felt free to cuss him out behind his back. But they was scared of him, too. They wanted to run away, but they knowed he didn’t tolerate it. Back as a Union officer in the war, he was already famous for hanging deserters and he had not give up the practice.
A beefy character name of Homer was riding alongside of me, his bushy red beard peeking out through the snow heaping up there. He had a squeaky bark when he talked that minded me of people I knowed from the Ozarks back home, and when I asked, he said he might of been from there or thereabouts, but he was born a rambling man and place didn’t stick to him. As for the general, he says he was a dirty low-down liar and a fraud. “He ain’t even a general, only just a cunnel, he dresses like a floozy, and a hatefuller bully I hain’t never seen. He shot deserters without no trial and wouldn’t let doctors tend the wounded nor drug their pain whilst they was a-dying. I was there. I seen it. They court-martialed the weasely shite-poke, but here he is, sporting about free and easy, whilst the only officer who ever had the guts to stand up to him has been wholly ruint!”