We hadn’t got far when our scouts come back with the report of a column of troops about half a day’s ride ahead, moving our way. Now at the big camp they had had a few flintlocks, so about three of our warriors was now armed in this fashion, and Hump, who had been waiting for years for this eventuality, wanted to ride on and fight the soldiers. But Old Lodge Skins and the head chiefs of the Burnt Arteries was concerned for the women and children, so we turned and went back south in search of our other folks. Traveling east, we caught up with some of the southern people and reassembled with them again near the Solomon’s Fork. It wasn’t the whole crowd from before, but we had maybe three hundred fighting men and say ten or fifteen flintlocks which seemed to the Cheyenne pretty formidable armament.

The excitement was so great I didn’t have no time to work out my new point of view: I had already decided theoretically, as I said, that the utter annihilation of the paleface on the western prairie wasn’t no skin off my arse: I didn’t know a white man west of St. Joe except for the remnants of my own family who by now must long have reached Salt Lake. But when I studied that out, I never actually saw myself participating in such a massacre. Now here was a battle coming up with the U.S. Cavalry and I was passing for a Cheyenne warrior of some repute. I had the choice of being a coward or either kind of traitor. I remember wishing we was still fighting the Crow.

It sure was a serious problem, but all the time I considered it I was stripping down, daubing myself with red and yellow war paint, and honing the heads of my arrows on a little whetstone. There are some who in moments of indecision cease all bodily movement so as to give free play to the mind, but I’m the other type: I give employment to my hands, figuring my brain will follow suit. When this don’t work, there ain’t no reason to believe I’d have got any farther by sitting with my chin on my knuckles.

We sent the women and children off south below the Arkansas, although owing to the confidence the Cheyenne had at this moment they set up the lodges again and left them standing. Then Ice themedicine man led us to a little lake nearby, in which we made ourselves invulnerable by dipping our hands in the water. When the soldiers fired we’d just put up our palms and the balls would barely clear the muzzles and dribble to the ground.

That was when the whole business cleared up for me: I was going to die.

You can go so far with Indians and then that sort of thing comes up. I know the medicine of Left-Handed Wolf had cured me of my head wound, but I believe that happened because I was unconscious during most of the healing, and when you are out of your right mind there don’t seem to be any rules as to what is possible. Dead drunk, a man can take a fall that when sober would mash him like a tomato. I don’t want to be no bigot: I’m not saying that under no conditions can a rifle ball be stopped by magic. What I’m saying is that it ain’t going to be stopped by someone who don’t believe it can be done as applied to himself. Which was me. So far as Hump went, or Burns Red in the Sun, or Younger Bear, that was their lookout.

If you been listening close you might have caught me up back a ways in the part about fighting the Crow. That first one I killed had found I was white even in the dark: what about those we rode against in the daytime? I painted my face and body, but how about my red hair? I’ll tell you. After all the enthusiasm over my first exploit, I certainly didn’t want to mention the peculiar conditions of it to any of the Human Beings, for that Crow’s discovery of my race, his friendly ways, etc., would only have confused them to hear about. But when we rode out in war, I had represented my problem to Old Lodge Skins in this style:

“Grandfather,” I said, which is how you address a man of his age, “I want to do something and don’t know the proper way. I don’t want the Crow to see the color of my head, and yet I don’t want them to think I have been such a coward as to cut off my hair so I can’t be scalped. I am still too young and have taken too few coups to wear a full war bonnet.”

The chief thought this over, and then he took his plug hat and put it on my head. It was a bit big and came down to my ears, but all the better for coverage.

“Whenever you fight, you may wear this,” he said, “but give it back between times because it goes with that medal the Father sent to me from the main village of the whites.”

And that’s what I did, stuffing a little padding inside the band so it’d be snugger and tying it to my chin with a rawhide cord. As to the hair on my nape, I’d run the paint up to cover that. I still didn’t have no braids, of course, and the Crow probably didn’t take me for a 100 per cent Cheyenne, for Indians have sharp eyes even in the press of war, but I could have been a breed.

Now we were about to go against the troops, so I went to where Old Lodge Skins with the other leaders was planning our order of battle, they doing this in a formal way like with a trained army, and I caught his attention and asked for the hat, which he was then wearing.

He drew me aside; in fact, we both mounted and rode up on the bluffs above the river, him on one of his marvelous pintos that did his bidding without a word or touch of the bridle. At the highest point we stopped, and he looked into the distances and remarked there was 250 horse soldiers about five miles off, followed two or three miles behind by a body of infantry. I couldn’t see a goddam thing but the swelling prairie.

Then he put his bright old eyes on me and said:

“My son, those are white people that we are going to destroy. This will be the first time I have ever faced the whites as an enemy. I have always believed they had a reason for what they did, and I still do. They are strange and do not seem to know where the center of the world is. And because of that, I have never liked them but never hated them either. However, recently they have been behaving badly towards the Human Beings. Therefore we must rub them out.”

He looked sort of embarrassed and scratched his nose.

“I don’t know whether you can remember back that far, before you became a Human Being and as dear a son to me as those I made with Buffalo Wallow Woman and the others, filling my heart with pride and bringing honor to my tepee.… I shall not speak of that earlier time, which has probably been washed from your memory. I just wish to say that if you do recall it and believe riding against these white-skinned ones would be bad medicine, you can stay out of the fight and no one will think the worse. You have proved many times you are a man, and a man must do what is in his heart and no one can question it.”

He wouldn’t say I was white, see, but was giving me an out if I wanted one. With his usual arrogance he assumed anybody who had the chance would rather be Cheyenne; but with his consideration, which was no less habitual, he was acknowledging the fact of my birth.

“Grandfather,” I said, “I think it is a good day to die.”

You tell that to an Indian, and he don’t immediately begin soothing you or telling you you’re wrong, that everything’s going to be swell, etc., for it ain’t the hollow speech it would be among whites. Nor is it suicidal, like somebody who takes the attitude that life has gone stale for him, so he’s going to throw it over. What it means is you will fight until you’re all used up. Far from being sour, life is so sweet you will live it to the hilt and be consumed by it. One time before I joined the tribe a band of Cheyenne caught the cholera from some emigrants and those that wasn’t yet dying got into battle dress, mounted their war ponies, and challenged the invisible disease to come out and fight like a man.

I don’t honestly know whether I was saying it in the Indian sense, but Old Lodge Skins took it so and give me the plug hat. A jackrabbit appeared at that moment and sat there within easy range, wrinkling its nose at him. He got a bothered look, wheeled, and galloped down to the bottomland. It was several years before I talked to him again.