LITTLE BIG MAN

Now it was C Troop, there below, all gone except a handful what scrambled up to us and fell behind the horse-corpse barricade, some hit in the back while so doing and belching blood onto the present occupants who pulled them in to add to the growing mortuary. Tom Custer was not of that number, so had got his, I expect. And young Reed was near me, one minute a-working his expensive sporting rifle and the next stone dead with his mouth open and tongue turning black, and I never saw Boston at all: he had probably dropped on our ride up from the river.

So as man, the General had lost two brothers, a nephew, and very likely his sister’s husband; as commanding officer, the better part of five troops; as cavalryman, his mount. In smaller things, his hat was gone and one revolver; the other he was firing, down on one knee now. His pants was tore, and most of the buttons off his double-breasted shirt, where he had ripped it further open to relieve the heat.

Mark Kellogg, the journalist, lay on his face in the gravel, presumably gone under though there was not a tear on his back anywhere, and from his coat pocket protruded the rolled foolscap of his last dispatch, never sent. Sergeant Hughes, what carried Custer’s personal guidon, was terribly hurt from a gut-wound that curled him up on the ground like a caterpillar around the point of a sharp stick, yet somehow he kept the ba

I haven’t mentioned my own wounds, though I had received a couple. I had been struck in the left shoulder by a ball from a muzzle-loader, I reckon, for it had enormous power behind it, lifting me right off the prone position, reversing my head with my boots, so my spine whomped onto the ground and I couldn’t breathe for a minute. But I returned to place directly and got the Indian who done it, for he seen me go over and confidently exposed himself while reloading and nobody else was left to fire at him for thirty yards on either side of me. I give him one in the breastbone and let it go at that, having to conserve ammunition; down he went, and his pals pulled him back into the grass to die or recover, I would never know.

They done the same with all their casualties, whereas ours lay around us, and the dead horses, and owing to the heat the latter was ready to ripen soon, the laid-open flesh already growing dark, and there was even more flies on that hill than Indians, for commotion don’t touch that miserable little beast. I had a few at my bleeding shoulder, feeling their tiny feet where I still could sense no pain. I had also been scored across the cheek by an arrow, at an angle so that the blood trickled into the corner of my mouth, from which salty taste I discovered it in the first place.

But that hangover, now, that was altogether gone, along with the depreciating effect of no sleep for two days: nothing like a massacre to clear your head. I don’t believe my sight was ever keener, before nor since. Too bad there was nothing to use it on but savage enemies and sage, since I figured my seeing would soon end along with everything else. There couldn’t have been over thirty-forty of us left. I don’t know how long we had fought so far; sometimes it seemed like a whole lifetime and at others as brief as a sneeze since that gallop down Medicine Tail Coulee and then up onto the ridge.

I was conscious of somebody falling nearby and turned and seen it was Lieutenant Cooke, his magnificent whiskers a-swimming in gore; had been crawling along the line and got up too high for a second, his last. Then Custer come along, erect no more but his belly scraping the gravel. There was blood on him, too, splattered from someone else, I believe, for he was not yet wounded.

“Cooke,” he says, and nudged the adjutant’s lifeless form. “Cooke, take an order for Benteen.” And then spitting the dust and stones out of his mouth, he says, “Cooke, write this down: ‘Come quickly, and the day is ours.’… Have you got that, Cooke?”

“He’s dead, General,” I says.

“Get the name of the man who said that, Cooke,” Custer snapped, his eyes red-veined and not looking either at me or the adjutant but towards the head of my fallen pony.

I don’t know, I guess I felt sorry for him then, so I took up the role of Cooke and he never detected the difference.

I says: “Yes sir, I’ll take care of it.” And Custer mumbled some and rolled over on his back, his hands behind his neck, and looked into the sky and smiled as if at secret knowledge. Another of them great arrow-masses vaulted overhead, catching sunlight on the ground edges of their iron points, and coming down like sleet through his field of vision.

He never wavered-and as it happened, these was doing less damage now, for there wasn’t many targets left to hit-but says in an easy tone of voice, like a genial scholar:

“Taking him as we find him, at peace or at war”-them arrows come swooshing down to stick upright all over dead men and horses-“at home or abroad,” Custer goes amiably on, “waiving all prejudices, and laying aside all partiality, we will discover in the Indian a subject for thoughtful study and investigation.”

I took time to discourage about fifty savages from advancing for a minute or two; I was fast ru

As I reloaded, I heard him say: “It is to be regretted that the character of the Indian as described in Cooper’s interesting novels is not the true one. Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet him, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the noble red man.”

A rift opened up above him, and he smiled at the blue sky there revealed, lecturing at it with a dirty finger.

“We see him as he is, and, so far as all knowledge goes, as he ever has been, a savage in every sense of the word.”

Well, he had an altogether appropriate subject, you could not deny him that, and his discourse was being embellished by the gunfire and howling of five thousand individuals of the very race; and I thought I could hear the devilish screeching of the women from the quarter nearest the river, and knowed what they was up to: clubbing the last sparks of life from our boys who lay wounded there, and mutilating all.

But that parting of the smoke took my attention then, for it lengthened gradually towards the southeast on some random current, and after a time you could see a good three mile across the stretch of ridges and bluffs by which we had come to this place, and the sun was on that far high point where Custer had took his second sight of the village, where I seen in Reed’s young face the begi

And a tiny flicker showed there! No Indian lance-pe

“General!” I says, yelling through Custer’s monologue. “Look there, look there!”

Now you recall his crazy lone gallop towards the ford, from which Mitch Bouyer rescued him, and afterwards he turned normal again and done as good a job of leading as a man could under the circumstances. Well, he had seemed even farther gone at present, what with that raving, but I kept a-shouting at him anyway, and finally he moved his dull eyes towards the east, and then instantly they ignited.

“That’s Benteen!” he snapped, and scrambled to his feet, erect again amid the hail of missiles and impervious to them. “Come on, boys,” he shouted to the sprawling quick and dead along the ridge, “give a volley to direct him!”