The tribe had roped up near a thousand ponies and what the general wanted was for me to shoot them all. It seemed such a rotten low-down thing to do. They was good ponies and hadn’t hurt nobody. I says I could herd them all back to the fort, but he reckoned I couldn’t, and anyways there warn’t no use for horses broke in Indian-style. “They’re enemy weapons,” he says, “and they must be destroyed.”
He rode off to roust me out some extra shooters and to tot up the numbers of the killed and captured natives. There warn’t no wounded ones. They was all summerly dispatched, which he said on such a night was an act of mercy. Whilst he was busy with that, I loosed up the corral ropes best I could, trying to think what Tom Sawyer would do to stir up a restlessness. He’d like enough have thought about it back at the fort and fetched along a pocketful of black pepper, but I ain’t so smart as Tom and didn’t have no pepper.
The soldiers the general volunteered me come over from the blazing lodges, wiping their knife blades off on the seats of their pants and sucking from flasks of hard liquor. They was a most horrible sight to see. There was blood all over their hands and faces and bellies, and their shirttails was out and their eyes was popping and their teeth was showing and they was snorting and wheezing like they’d run a mile. They didn’t waste no time. They was all fired up and set right to pushing their hot gun barrels against the ponies’ heads and sending the piteous creturs crumpling to their knees. It was too many for me, I couldn’t stand it no more, but I couldn’t see no way out.
Then, all of a sudden, Star took to bucking and kicking and I don’t know if I set him off or the flames from the camp did or if he done it himself, but the next thing all them horses was busting through the loosed ropes and bolting in all directions. I was hanging on to Star’s neck for dear life, scared of falling off and getting tromped in the stampeed. Some of the soldiers did get stomped on, but others further off was shooting at the runaway ponies, and some got away but most of them was murdered.
Star warn’t rearing and kicking no more, but he was trembling all over, and his eyes was wild. I stroked his sweaty neck with my gloves and talked quiet in his ear, trying to steady him. I felt like him and me was drawing close and understood each other. General Hard Ass come over on his horse through the smoke and stared hard at us for a moment, and then, still smiling his frozen smile, he raised up his pistol and shot Star in the head. He looked down at me where we’d fell and says to get on one of the horses I’d led here, we was going back to the fort.
The snowflakes was still a-drifting down in the early morning light, falling on hundreds of dead ponies and dead Indians and smoldering tepees, as we got back on the trail we’d laid down on the snow going there. I was shaking and needed a pipe, but it was too cold to take my hands out of my gloves, and my teeth was clattering so, I’d a likely bit clean through the pipe stem.
On the way back we passed a lonely stand of froze-up cottonwood trees where the deserters was hanging. Homer, being a stout fellow, hung lower’n the others, and the snow had shook out of his thick red beard. Homer always said place never stuck to him; instead, it was him who’d got stuck to place. Their horses was standing round looking downhearted and guilty and half-froze. The officers ordered me to gather them in with the others and take them to the fort, whilst they cut down the bodies, and I done that.
I was scared and ashamed and only wanted to run off somewheres and hide when we got back, but it was late November, which ain’t never a good time for setting off nowheres. Soon as spring come, though, I lit out. The army life warn’t for me. I knowed that before, but I’d forgot.
CHAPTER VIII
HAT WAS THE summer I become an ornerary Lakota Sioux. I’d been awful afraid a that tribe since they ambushed Dan Harper’s patrol to death, and from what people was saying, I warn’t even for certain they was human altogether. Yet, the next thing a body knows, there I am, smoking, hunting, and drinking with them, even living in one a their buffalo-skin lodges with a native woman.