But I was desperate to see Tom again, I’d been dancing about ever since I seen Becky, so I pulled my hat down over my eyes and rode Tongo back into town looking for them. I didn’t find nuther one. Who I found—or who found me—was General Hard Ass. Me and Tongo was resting by a stream, cooling off from the midday heat and calculating where to look next, when I smelt the cinnamon. I looked up and there was the general setting his horse over me, fitted out proud in his red neckerchief and his pressed uniform with its shiny brass buttons and epolets. “Well, well,” he says. He was sporting a broad-brimmed cream-colored slouch hat with the brim turned up on one side and fastened to the crown so’s he could sight his rifle whilst galloping along. His rifle was slung across his lap and he warn’t hiding it. “Our deserter.”
“I ain’t a deserter,” I says. I got to my feet and so did Tongo. “Sir.” He was still setting a mile above me, his yaller hair curling over his shoulders. “I ain’t never been a soldier. I’m just a plain cowboy wrangler and I only set out to sign on another cattle drive, like I said I’d do. I asked Charlie to tell you.”
“If you work for the army, son, you’re IN the army.”
“But . . . well . . .” I had to think up something fast but my brain was froze. I was scared for me, but more for Tongo. Seeing that rifle resting there made me think about Star and how his days ended, which I knowed was how he wanted me to think. We was in trouble. “I was in trouble, sir,” I says, but I didn’t know yet what trouble I meant. I couldn’t use Charlie’s story, because it was likely the general already heard it. He was staring down on me, waiting for more. “There was a man wanted to kill me.”
“What for?”
“He kept his lady hog-tied in a covered ammunition wagon and give her wrathful hidings there. He thought I’d been messing with her.”
“Were you?”
“No, sir. Not exactly. I was only trying to help the lady in her distressidness.” The general smiled benignly. “She was sweet but she had a dirty mouth. When the man started shooting, I lit out.”
“I see. You disappointed me, Finn. I had high hopes for you. But I can understand how circumstances might have interfered with your judgment.” I was dressed mostly in cowboy clothes to do the shopping, but I was wearing my beaded buckskin shirt and had my bear-claw neckless on for luck, and the look he was giving them things warn’t a friendly one. “But you can redeem yourself. You’re traveling with Indians. I assume you were captured while running away. No white man would voluntarily live with savages.”
“No, sir. I wouldn’t never think of it.”
“In fact, you’re living with a squaw. I’m told Kiwingya is her name.”
“No, she—”
“It’s all right. Sometimes it’s a practical thing to do.” I warn’t sure how he knowed all this, but I could guess. “I once had a squaw myself. She was a princess of some sort and was kindly and serviceable. But I’d have happily had her disemboweled and fed to the wolves if that had been a convenient example to others, and I assume you’d do the same.”
“I hope I don’t never need such samples, General. But I anyways don’t live with her and the tribe no more. She throwed me over and turned the tribe against me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Finn. I have something for you to do, and it might be useful if you were still living among them. You’ll have to go back to them and make amends.”
“They’re awful mad at me. They won’t let me back.”
The general was giving Ne Tongo a long dark study. I took hold of Tongo’s rawhide thong. “I think I recognize this stallion,” he says. “He’s one of the animals that got away during our attack on the Cheyenne, when you couldn’t control your own horse. If so, he’s army property and you, in effect, are a horse thief.”
“No, sir. Wild Bill give me this horse back in Abileen. Roped it himself up in the Utah Territory. He says it was the wildest horse he ever seen, and when I broke him, he bought me a whisky and says I could keep him. You can ask him.”
“I will. I know Bill well. What’s the horse’s name?”
“Big River, sir. Mostly I just call him River.”
“When you were talking to him just now, he had a different name. An Indian one. And he has been broken the way the natives do it, not like I watched you do it for the army. Why do I get the feeling, Finn, you’re not being honest with me?”
He was right, I was unloosing one bare-face lie after t’other, and if I could a thought up another one, I surely would a let it out, but before I could roust one up, the general he says: “You’re an American, son, those savages aren’t. You mustn’t betray your own people. That’s treason.”
My crimes was a-stacking up. There warn’t no more sand in my craw. I could only hold onto Tongo and try not to show how guilty I was.
“We’re going to lure the Lakota warriors into a cul-de-sac and destroy them, the same way they murdered your friend Corporal Harper and his brave army unit. I also had a young friend in that garrison who was killed. And while the savages are chasing us, their camp will be vulnerable to attack, so it too will be destroyed and all who are in it. That’s what’s going to happen, Finn. And you’re going to help. You’ll return now to the tribe and when we need you, you will be informed and you will lead them to us and us to them.” He smiled down at me. “That’s an order, son.” He didn’t have to say no more. I knowed what they done to deserters, traiters, liars and horse thieves. General Hard Ass took another long hard look at Tongo, touched the wide brim of his hat and, still smiling his cold fixed smile, slowly rode away.
CHAPTER XVI