Down behind the barricade, I quick stripped off my shirt, made a ball of it about the size of my head, and jammed my felt hat onto it, with the brim down low, which is the way a man would wear it in the bright sun along the Cimarron. I had a jacket, too, and got back into it, pulling in my neck like a turtle and buttoning the garment right up over my head. The arms hung loose, with my own inside, and I slipped one hand up and held that shirt-head, wearing the hat, onto the jacket neck.
Up I rose, about six feet five to the crown of the hat, looking out of a peephole between the top jacket buttons, and started to walk towards the galloping ring of Snake People. All I had to rely on was their knowing the legend of Little Man the Great Cheyenne. And you can be sure that before they made up their minds, they kept firing arrows at me for a spell and one went through the limp arm of my jacket.
But directly they begun to slow down to a trot, then to a walk, still encircling but fascinated. Well sir, here goes, I thought; I’m going to shoot my wad. At that point I had passed the body of one of the Wilkersons, looking blank towards the sky and with two arrows in his chest. I pitched that fake head right off my fake shoulders. It hit the ground and rolled, but I had balled it tight and the hat never come off.
The Comanche stopped dead. I remember thinking: I’ve got you sons of bitches now, ain’t I? Oh, ain’t I? I had forgot Little Man’s war song or I’d have sung it.
But I didn’t have them by no means. A warrior suddenly rode over, picked up the shirt-head on the point of his short lance, looked at it and throwed it away, and then they took me captive.
Well, you can’t call it a failure. Had I not done it, they would have killed me. And I learned a valuable lesson: Don’t try to fool an Indian who has seen a lot of white men. The Comanche had been raiding the Santa Fe Trail for forty years.
They didn’t treat me bad, and I reckon they intended to trade me off for guns or something, but having been put to herding their horses for them, one night I stole one and rode off. It was fast and hard travel, and before long he died on me and I continued to New Mexico on foot. It was the end of summer before I reached Taos, in the mountains north of Santa Fe. For quite a time I hadn’t seen a town of any description, so I was rather cheered just to see the Pueblo Indians’ dwellings there, though I never could get up much affection for that type of redskin, who was always farmers and lived clustered together like bats from time immemorial. With the whole world open to them, they settled down and raised little patches of beans. The Comanche used to raid them every once in a while and so did the Navaho and Apache. A wild Indian don’t like a tame one.
There was a white town down the trail a piece from the Indian one, so I went on down there. I was sure a sight after those weeks in desert and mountain. I’d kneel down and drink from a pool with my eyes shut so as not see my ugly reflection.
So I can’t blame a famous hero for what he done when I showed up at his front door. I saw this adobe house, see, built around one of them inner courtyards, and I figured this was where I might get a handout. So I goes onto the veranda, and the door was open for it was hot weather, and I calls into the cool, dark interior: “Anybody to home?”
A fellow about my size, short that is, with a sandy mustache and real bandylegs, appears from the shadows within and says: “Git on out of here, you hairy son of a whore.”
And I did, for he was real mean-looking. Later some Mexican off whom I begged a couple tortillas told me that was Senor Kit Carson.
In a day or so I reached Santa Fe, down in its valley among the mountains, with its Mex women in their bright colors and naked shoulders, and Pueblo Indians sitting about selling their junk and a Ute or two in red blankets walking arrogant around, and Spanish cowboys in them tight pants slitted at the ankle, along with the more usual types you might see anywhere. That was quite a town for the time and place, but you would never have known it by one look. Most everybody lived in them adobe houses, which is no more than dried mud; consequently they seem a little childish at first, like some kids patty-caked them together. Even the Governors’ Palace off the town square was of this construction. If St. Louie was your idea of a city, you wouldn’t have thought much of Santa Fe, which one good rain would have turned into a hog wallow.
It was all right with me, though, and I did a lot better there than in St. Louie. I don’t mean I got rich, nor tried to. I took up with a fat Mexican woman who sold chili con carne, tamales, and the like right on the street, also cooked them there over an open fire. She took pity on me for being so skinny, was how it started. Before long I had moved into her little ’dobe house, which we also shared with five or six of her kids, but her husband run off or been killed, she wasn’t sure which. Sometimes she’d believe the first, in which case she’d threaten me with him coming back and knifing me; and sometimes the other, and would want me and her to go to the priest and get hitched.
Estrellita was always yelling and scolding, and occasionally would get sufficiently riled so as to threaten to knife me herself, but I discovered that was the Mexican temperament, and it was easy to get her in a good mood again by doing some romantic thing like calling her “my little chili pepper” or whatnot. Speaking of peppers, my stomach was ruined for years by that Spanish grub and it put more calluses on my tongue than I had on my hands during these months. For I didn’t do no work. I just laid around all day in the shade, and then in the evening, when the air had cooled enough so that the effort of walking wouldn’t upset me, I’d summon up enough energy to drag myself to a cantina and lay into glass after glass of pulque, which Estrellita give me the money to buy.
I was morally very low at this time, and just sixteen. I reckoned it run in the family, having seen my brother Bill, and didn’t worry none. If you want to really relax sometime, just fall to rock bottom and you’ll be a happy man. Most all troubles come from having standards.
I might have died of a bad liver, what with that diet, but I was saved by an old-timer I run into in that cantina. This fellow was about seventy, had a face of white hair, a speech defect which he claimed come from Apache torture when a lad, and professed to be a expert on locating gold. Everybody called him Crazy Charley, or Loco Carlos, depending on their lingo, and you can gather from that what they thought of his ability as a prospector.
The reason I took up with Charley, to the extent of buying him drinks with Estrellita’s hard-earned money, was my natural weakness for people with a positive vision. He might have been a penniless old drunk, but there wasn’t any getting away from it that he talked an excellent idea. After prospecting for fifty years, he claimed to have located the biggest lode of gold in the “organized world” (which is how he referred to it, for Charley always talked mighty grandiose), and just at that point the Ute stole his pack animals, to which was lashed all his tools, and trailing them he got lost in the desert without water, lost his mind for a time, wore out his boots, and walked all the way to Taos in his bare feet. In spite of these “horrendous misadventures,” he remembered exactly where that gold was: in a region of Colorado between the Arkansas River and the South Platte.
Charley would take a sip of liquor, roll it around in his toothless mouth, swallow with his whiskers aflutter, and say: “If I had your pecuniary endowments, sonny, I’d buy a set of possibles and ram-bunculate northwards, coming back within six months as a man of means beyond the dreams of algebra.” That is near as I can come to his style, and you must also realize that all the s sounds was slurred owing to that scar on his tongue. “Shunny” is actually what he called me. When he finished that drink, and if I wouldn’t buy him no more, around the room he’d go and make such a nuisance of himself that the big Mex who owned the place would throw him out the door sooner or later, and when you’d leave, there he’d be, sleeping alongside the road with the pigs rooting nearby.