LITTLE BIG MAN

There we went, pounding along, us few whites and forty Pawnee, with maybe a hundred and fifty Cheye

The ground slowly ascended towards a line of hills. Now and again a Cheye

Now we was reaching the slopes, and higher on could see the Cheye

They managed the retreat as well as Indians could with no discipline and no strategy, and was no longer in rout though steadily losing men. Seventeen Cheye

Then we outflanked them, being they was afoot and with their fleeing village spread across the hills and into the valleys between, and despite what North could do to prevent it, his men killed a few noncombatants, for the Pawnee medicine was great that day and fed by fresh blood, and to an Indian an enemy is fair game of whatever sex or size. I saw a Cheye

However, it did give me a start, for this fight was another thing from the trouble in which Olga and Gus was carried off. I got no satisfaction in ru

Thinking in this negative fashion I continued to ride and before I knowed it had got separated from the Pawnee now charging the right of the Cheye

It was right dry, and clouds of dust climbed to meet those of gunsmoke, and then the wind spread the mixture as a thin fog across the country, filtering the sunlight, and the colors looked intense as they do at a certain hour of evening. I was about half a mile now from the concentrated fire, so that it popped rather than blasted or snapped to my ear.

To make these observations and to rest my frothing pony, I had pulled him up at the lip of a deep ravine. Bad place to halt during a fight, and being an Indian mount he knowed it, and strained to move on, tired as he was. And then he give a deep sigh and sunk beneath me, like I was sitting on a big bag of grain that had a small puncture out of which the grains leaked steadily. But I leaped free before he was all the way down, being horseman enough to realize he had took an arrow in his belly. Though I hadn’t heard its flight nor felt its entry.

There was a Cheye

Well, it was single-shot and wouldn’t do him no good unless he carried a supply of .56 rimfires. So I pulled my pistol and hurled myself to the brink and had he been still up on the bank where he seized my rifle I’d of killed him straightway, but he had already slid to the bottom with the Ballard at his knees all fouled with sand and empty, and he knowed it and was out of arrows, and drawed his knife, and, standing up, began to sing of death.

I recognized this man. It was Shadow That Comes in Sight. I wish he done as much for me, for as I started down the bank, he come to meet me with unfriendly intent and that edged weapon.

CHAPTER 16 My Indian Wife

“HOLD ON, BROTHER,” I cried in Cheye

He held up his knife, with his left fingers gripping the right-hand wrist, so as to give added support for the impact. Which is to say, I was about to be impaled just below the arch of my rib-cage. My accidental shot had gone into the air.

Well, I was only falling six feet, but the time consumed by any type of action is relative, and I recall hanging motionless there in space like the subject in a photograph or artist’s rendering. Shadow wore two eagle feathers, aslant one from the other. There was beads of sweat upon his brown shoulders. He wore a choker of horizontal porcupine quills divided by vertical lines of blue beads; and between his left bicep and elbow cavity, a copper armlet; between his legs a dirty breechclout of red fla

Almost at my leisure I floated down upon the point of the knife, and when I struck it and thought sort of lackadaisically that I was sure disemboweled, time speeded up again, and I was tumbling over him at great speed and still unwounded, for without willing it I had somehow altered my style of fall and took the blade in my shirt between arm and ribs. It seemed warm there from the close call, from the threat unsatisfied; had I been cut, I would have felt nothing; that is the peculiarity of knifeplay. Well, roll we did through the sand and scrub brush, and he was a powerful Indian though fifty year old. I had lost my pistol, but he kept his knife. Still I sought to talk, but his thumb was into my throat box so far as almost to break through the floor of my mouth. Being small and limber I kneed him frequent in the lower belly, but his iron ballocks sustained these blows without effect, and I missed my chops at the paralyzing neckcord below the left ear.