LITTLE BIG MAN

The others roundabout muttered peevishly in agreement with them sentiments. I couldn’t make head nor tail of his complaints, however, so I just explained where and how I had got the pony and said that regardless of that, he could have him on general principles, being my brother.

I had now used the word “brother” a couple times, and it was begi

“Why do you keep calling me ‘brother’? I want you to stop doing that. I am not your brother. I am a Human Being.”

And the swarthy fellow holding my right arm, who wore a belt full of scalps one of which was blond as corn and never come from no Pawnee, said: “I think we should kill him first and then talk.” I did not know this man, but among the others I recognized Bird Bear and Lean Man and Rolling Bull, the latter restraining my left arm.

“Well,” I says boldly, “it seems the Human Beings ca

Burns Red in the Sun said: “He rode beside me at the Battle of the Long Knives, where the white men did not know how to fight. He was killed there after rubbing out many bluecoats. But the white men did not get his body. He turned into a swallow and flew away across the bluffs.”

“I tell you,” I cried, “that I am Little Big Man. How would I know about him otherwise?”

“All people know of him,” said Burns Red in that stubborn redskin ma

“Look at me,” I said.

“Oh,” said Burns Red, “Little Big Man may have had light skin, but that does not mean he was a white man. Besides, what you are showing me is you and not him.”

Well, there you have it. There ain’t nothing in the world, not the most intractable mule, that is so obdurate as a goddam Indian. I figured I was a goner at this point, especially since Burns said he was going to cut out my tongue for telling lies, at which that especially mean fellow on my right arm was considerably cheered. He was no more than a kid, about my age when I killed the Crow. I have said I didn’t recognize him, but suddenly I did.

He was Dirt on the Nose, growed up some from that young boy to whom I had give a pony after the exploit in which I got my adult name.

Burns Red drawed his knife. I looked at Dirt on the Nose. Hell, it was worth a try.

I asked him: “You still have that black I gave you up on the Powder River?”

His ferocious look disappeared, and he answered: “No, the Pawnee stole him when we were camped at Old Woman Butte two snows ago.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked Burns Red in the Sun.

His face went blank, insofar as you could say behind that paint.

“It is true,” he said, “that there is a thing here that I do not understand.”

I proceeded to rapid-fire a number of other detailed reminiscences at him, but he was not further impressed. He put away his knife, though. It was that particular about the horse that saved my life, or at least my tongue. People came and went in them days, but horses was serious.

So them Indians decided to take me to their camp and let the older men adjudicate the matter. I was no longer physically constrained, but neither had they reached the point of returning my weapons. They left a guard upon the mule ski

The Cheye

“What am I going to ride?” I asked Burns.

That was a real problem for the poor devil. Now that his stubbor

He looked at me with his face all screwed up.

“There is a pain,” he said, “between my ears.” He reached back between the feathers of his bo

“I won’t walk all the way,” I said. “I can tell you that.”

You could see he was kind of wistful that he hadn’t been allowed to cut my tongue out, not because Burns was unusually cruel but rather because it would have kept this difficulty from arising.

“Ride behind me,” said Dirt on the Nose, who trusted me about seven-eighths since mention of the horse I had give him. So I leaped up behind and took ahold of his belt, for I didn’t dare to dig those Spanish heels into the animal, and we moved off, going north for two hours, and fetching up along a tiny creek that for poverty of water didn’t have its match.

There on the farther bank stood the tepees of Old Lodge Skins’s little band, which seemed about the size it had always been, but Jesus God, I thought, had they always been so seedy? And it is a queer thing that the stench affected me more now than it had as a boy of ten, entering that first encampment with my sister Caroline. To tell you how powerful this general smell was, even when diffused through the air in the smart wind that was blowing at the time, it overcome for me the personal odor of Dirt on the Nose, who was right strong on the nostrils being I was close to him.

Up we go to the familiar tepee of the chief, which had been my home for five years, with its faded scratch-drawings and sewed-up places and tattered flaps. From the look of things I figured Old Lodge Skins must have been enduring another of his long runs of bad luck. The dirty kids come ru

I begun to get nervous then, for though among Americans you tend to find people the less frightening the better you know them, the same wasn’t true of Indians in my experience, with whom prolonged relations only led to the awareness that they was capable of anything. My knees had been steadier than when Dirt on the Nose and me dismounted.

Among a group of braves, I ducked in through the tepee entrance. Inside it was darker than of old, for no fire was lit and my eyes hadn’t been accustomed for some time to coming into gloom out of burning sunshine. We turned to the right and paused for a minute, as was the proper ma