“It is true that I am blind,” he admits, “though the rifle ball did not strike my eyes but rather passed through the back of my neck, cutting the tunnel through which the vision travels to the heart. Look,” he said, opening his lids, “my eyes still see, but they keep it all within themselves, and it is useless because my heart does not receive it.”
His eyes did look bright enough. I reckon it was the nerve which had been cut or stunned in some manner.
“Where did that happen, Grandfather?” I handed him back the long pipe.
He looked some embarrassed, and the smoke stayed inside him a great time before it come gushing from his mouth and nose.
“Sand Creek,” he finally says.
And I groaned: “Ah, no!”
“I remember your advice,” he says, “but we did not go up to the Powder River, after all. Instead we went to the treaty council. I shall tell you how it was. Hump had never attended a conference, and it was one of his needs to own a silver medal like my own. And then our young men said: ‘Why shouldn’t we get presents from the white men for talking to them? We are always in the north, and these Southern Cheyenne get everything.’ I must admit,” Old Lodge Skins goes on, “that I did not myself mind having a new red blanket.
“So that is why we turned around and came back, and we touched the pen with the white men sent by their Father, and Hump received his medal and the young men their new pipe-hatchets, knives, and looking-glasses, and then we were going to the Powder River, but the soldier chief said: ‘You must stay in this place. That is what you agreed to do when you touched the pen.’ But I tell you I did not understand that. However, I know very little about treaties, so I believed the soldier chief was right, and we stayed, though that country was very ugly, with no water and no game. And then the soldiers attacked the village where we were camping with Black Kettle, and they rubbed out a great many of us, and that is where I was hit in the neck and became blind.”
Then I feared the worst and asked after Buffalo Wallow Woman.
“She was rubbed out at Sand Creek,” says Old Lodge Skins. “And White Cow Woman too. And Burns Red in the Sun and his wife Shooting Star. And Hump and High Wolf and Cut Nose and Bird Bear.”
“My brother Burns Red in the Sun.”
“Yes, and his wife and children. And many more, whom I will name only if you intend to mourn them, although that was several winters ago and now they will have reached the Other Side where the water is sweet, the buffalo abundant, and where there are no white men.”
The latter designation he pronounced nowadays in a special way: not exactly hatefully, for Old Lodge Skins was too much a man to sit about and revile his enemies. That was for a loser, like the Rebs what lost the Civil War. And he wasn’t a loser. He wasn’t a winner, maybe, but neither was he a failure. You couldn’t call the Cheyenne flops unless they had had a railroad engine of their own which never worked as well as the U.P.’s or had invented a gun that didn’t shoot straight.
Just to check my impression, I asks him: “Do you hate the Americans?”
“No,” he says, closing up his gleaming though dead eyes. “But now I understand them. I no longer believe they are fools or crazy. I know now that they do not drive away the buffalo by mistake or accidentally set fire to the prairie with their fire-wagon or rub out Human Beings because of a misunderstanding. No, they want to do these things, and they succeed in doing them. They are a powerful people.” He took something from his beaded belt at that point and, stroking it, said: “The Human Beings believe that everything is alive: not only men and animals but also water and earth and stones and also the dead and things from them like this hair. The person from whom this hair came is bald on the Other Side, because I now own this scalp. This is the way things are.
“But white men believe that everything is dead: stones, earth, animals, and people, even their own people. And if, in spite of that, things persist in trying to live, white men will rub them out.
“That,” he concludes, “is the difference between white men and Human Beings.”
Then I looked close at the scalp he stroked, which was of the silkiest blonde. For a moment I was sure it come from Olga’s dear head, and reckoned also he had little Gus’s fine skull-cover someplace among his filthy effects, the stinking old savage, living out his life of murder, rapine, and squalor, and I almost knifed him before I collected myself and realized the hair was honeyer than my Swedish wife’s.
I mention this because it shows how a person’s passion can reverse on the instant he is reminded of his own loss. I had just been moved by Sand Creek, and the next minute was ready to kill him.
Now, Old Lodge Skins took cognizance of my state though blind.
“Have you,” he asks, “a great sorrow or is it only bitterness?”
So I told him, and he never heard of the incident in which Olga and Gus was taken. He could not have lied. I have said that it is amazing what and how Indians know about events far distant from them; but likewise there are things they do not hear. In that era the capturing of white women and children was commonplace. A Cheyenne of one band might not know of those took by another, unless they camped together.
Then Old Lodge Skins said: “Our young men are angry nowadays. Many times they have not the patience to wait to ransom or exchange prisoners, but will become crazy with rage and rub them out. But was that not the voice of Sunshine I just heard outside my tepee? She is the widow of Little Shield, who was killed two moons ago, but now she will be your new wife and give you a new son, so that you have what you had before and better, for of course a woman of the Human Beings is superior to any other kind.”
He wasn’t being heartless, just making the best of likelihoods, as an Indian had to do in the sort of life he lived. His own two wives was massacred, and so he had mourned them for the proper time and then got himself replacements. These last had come and gone in the tepee while we talked: young women, sisters again, probably fifty year below the chief in age, but by God if they didn’t both look pregnant to me.
“All right,” I said. “But I tell you this, that if I find my first woman and my son again, I will take them back from whatever man is keeping them. And if they have been rubbed out, I will kill whoever did it.”
“Of course,” said Old Lodge Skins, for there wasn’t nothing an Indian could better understand than revenge, and he would have scorned me only if I had not wanted it.
There couldn’t have been a worse era for running with the Cheyenne. They was being chased throughout the whole frontier, and whenever they eluded their pursuers, would commit some new outrage against the whites. So I would be on the one hand a renegade to join them, in danger from the whole of my own race. On the other hand, I was under a constant threat from the Cheyenne themselves, for to many of them the very sight of a white face was the occasion for mayhem. I reckon the only thing that saved me was Old Lodge Skins’s band had collected apart from the main force of Chief Turkey Leg, who had commanded the fight at the railroad, so I was most of the time among the group in which I was reared and where the Little Big Man legend still had some power. My woman Sunshine was good protection, and of course Old Lodge Skins too. But there were braves who had growed up since I left the tribe, like young Cut Belly, who one day raided a stage station and come back with a jug of whiskey and says to me:
“I want you to go out on the prairie and hide, because though I do not wish to kill you now, I will when I am drunk. I’m sorry for this, because I am told you are a good man, but that is what will happen.”
Now the best way to get killed was to let a young fellow like that give you orders, so I says: “I think it is you who had better go out on the prairie for your drinking, because the way I am is that something comes over me when I see a drunk, and I have to shoot him, even if he is my brother. I can’t help it; that’s just how I am.”