I AIN’T GOING TO take you day by day through the time I was at that school and done interpreting of the kind of which I just give you an example which can stand for the rest. I’ll say right now them Cheyenne boys never did learn English or they learned more than they let on to, but the point remains if they was ever addressed in the simplest terms of it they did not respond, nor did any of them ever speak a word of English in my hearing. I used to wonder what might happen if they was tested by somebody saying, in English, that the people hoping to get the beef at dinner would have to ask for it by name, for all them boys cared for by way of food was meat, which was the scarcest item on the school menu, being furnished by the Government for reservations and schools like this, which meant a lot of the supply vanished mysteriously before it ever got there.
Or for that matter, what would they do if you yelled “Fire”? But of course I never tried these tests, for I was mostly sympathetic with the boys, which even then I realized was the kind of sentimentality that actually works to the detriment of them in whose favor you think you are acting. Oh, I would give them hell on this matter, saying, “What good are you doing yourself, or your people, going to school, if you don’t learn anything?”
The answer I’d get, from Wolf Coming Out or Walks Last or Goes in Sweat (whose names incidentally the Major changed respectively to Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and Anthony Wayne, though nobody but him used them, and he couldn’t tell one boy from another), the answer I’d get would be, “But we are learning what the white man teaches, for you are explaining it to us.”
And then I’d feel worse than ever, because I wasn’t really passing on what the teachers said in history and geography, and the least part of the arithmetic lessons was the words. As to English, the kind of young woman who gives the impression of being already old, kind of dried up before her time, was the teacher, Miss Dorothea Hupple by name. The way she taught seemed reasonable enough, and I guess she had some success with the other students, particularly the girls, who didn’t mind being taught by a woman.
She begun by pointing to various parts of her own person and giving the English for each, hair, ear, eye, nose, and so on. After hearing the word, the class was supposed to repeat it. But what they done at first was to say every word in Cheyenne, and even I was taken in by that at first, assuming they would go on to the English, which I would chime in, seconding Dorothea, but they never did. When I finally told them to knock it off or they’d get no meat for a week, Walks Last reminded me that nobody including the staff had got any in five days (neither had Mrs. Stevenson, who was thinking of quitting), and Wolf wanted me to tell the Veho woman to point to an intimate part of her anatomy and give the English name for it. “Or don’t white women have any?” he asks.
Now I had to conceal all this when I spoke to Dorothea because though them boys made me plenty mad at times, I felt more for them than I did for the whites, because of my upbringing but also because I could remember being in school when I was with the Pendrakes. I hated school. The difference was that not being an Indian I knowed I was wrong, which never made me like it better but was more forward-looking in the long run, a real difficult concept for the red man even though they might give lip service to it. They kept thinking they could stay completely Indian despite all the evidence to the contrary. That was what was both great and hopeless about them.
Now if Amanda had been the English teacher this sort of thing wouldn’t of gone on for long—I mean, I don’t know if the boys would of learned any more, but I would of had to explain what was going on with them, what they was really saying in Cheyenne, and so on, but Dorothea Hupple, see, had taken a shine to me. She was one of them spinsters come West to find a husband, where, respectable females being scarce, the prospects seemed good. But stuck in this school she didn’t enjoy such advantages, for not only was the other woman teachers in the same boat, but of the men there the Major was a widower too distracted by all his ideas to see a woman if he looked at her; John Bullock, who taught all the boys, including mine, the basic techniques of farming, plowing, seeding, reaping, and so on, was himself a farmer and lived with wife and kids, several of which were old enough to help him, on the land adjoining the school fields; Klaus Kappelhaus, the instructor in arithmetic, happened to be a German recently come from the Old Country, and though I guess he spoke English grammatically his accent was so strong few could understand him and his harsh voice scared Dorothea; and finally I suspected Charlevoix of being a heemaneh, the way he gave some of the lads the once-over in the bathhouse, though when I asked my boys, not mentioning him by name, if anybody tried to interfere with them, they said no, for if so they would of give him a good beating unless he put on a dress, after which he would be treated well, which is the Cheyenne tradition.
Anyway, Dorothea as I say took a fancy to me and therefore never made any fuss about the lack of progress of my boys at English and always accepted my lame excuses for them and my sanitized translations.
I was myself interested in Amanda Teasdale though not in the mooning way I felt towards Dora Hand. Amanda was not a teacher proper, unless substituting for someone under the weather, but rather the second-in-command to the Major in overseeing the school, and insofar as he let her manage things they would be well done until he got his hands on them again, for though his head was in the clouds a lot, he couldn’t tolerate a female having too much authority, in which he was like most white men and every male Indian I ever knowed, for example my boys, who thought even poor Dorothea Hupple showed the white woman’s tendency to be too bossy. Not that I myself was a radical in this respect, I tell you frankly, though I have never liked being lorded over by anyone of any sex or race, but I have never much resented a person whoever they might be that does or knows something better than myself. An opportunist like me couldn’t afford to be otherwise.
Amanda for example was an educated individual who had not only gotten all the way through regular school but then had went to a woman’s college in addition, so there wasn’t much in the way of learning that must of escaped her—in my opinion, but not in hers, for one of the notable things all that education done for her was make her dissatisfied. She claimed women wasn’t taught the important subjects like Greek and Latin and the kind of mathematics called calculus but rather how to draw and play the piano and read stories. As the last-named sounded preferable to me, I wondered why she would of wanted instead to learn dead lingos and how to calculate beyond the commonsense sums good enough for most folks, but I knew that if I made that point it would only be a further example of how ignorant I was, so I didn’t.
I got to know Amanda some during the time I was at that school, for she too seemed to like to talk to a man, with the difference that she was not looking for one to marry. In fact, after I got to know her better, she allowed as how she was against wiring, for herself anyhow, on account of it was a worse form of white slavery than them women who worked at the Lone Star, for they at least got paid and also could quit any time.
This was a new one on me, I had to admit, but I never argued the matter with her, for what did I know over someone who went to college? I did have experience of harlots, however, and could of told her the whole thing got complicated by the fact that, as I have said, them which I had knowed generally looked forward to getting married sometime and the ones that did seemed happier than respectable women in the same situation, make of that what you would. My own theory was that in their working life they got to know the worst weaknesses of men, which left only the good side to find in marriage. As for the husbands, well, they hadn’t no reason to sneak around the corner looking for a whore.
It was generally of a Saturday afternoon that I saw Amanda, for that was the only off time you got at school, though I never had much to do at certain times during the week, when the boys got their instruction in farming from John Bullock, who was a man of few words and taught by demonstrating how to use a plow, how to bale hay, and the rest of it, and my boys, according to John, was all right at it when they wanted to be, but sometimes they’d fall into some kind of Cheyenne mood which I had seen many a time when I lived with the tribe, though when they was amongst their own people this tended to happen on an individual basis and not in bunches at once. It was like they went someplace else in spirit while their body remained where it was. When they was in that state, nothing could be done with them.
But back to Amanda. It didn’t look to me like there was much to do for pleasure out there on them flat treeless plains that was turning into rich farmland when cultivated by men like John Bullock, and the nearest white town was no more than a whistle-stop and was too long a hike unless there had been something to do beyond watching the infrequent trains come and go, which is what the people who lived there did, but Amanda had found by walking about five miles out into the country you could reach a little stream, which had a nice bend in it shaded by cottonwoods.
She had been going there by herself, which was another of the things she done that was unusual for young ladies of the day but not as dangerous as it might of been at one time, now that wild Indians no longer roamed the region. I didn’t pretend I come along to protect her, which I might have done with another kind of girl even so, but Amanda disliked the idea she ever needed a man’s help for anything. I hadn’t run into that sort of female before, for she wasn’t no Calamity Jane type, dressing and acting manly, cussing, spitting, and chewing, and working as a mule skinner. For a hike in the country she even wore her everyday long dress and high-button shoes.
When I invited myself along for the first time I was surprised she agreed, never having shown the slightest interest in me after hiring me for the job, but I guess she was struck by the novelty of it, and low as I was on the totem pole I wasn’t in no position to compromise her authority.
On the first walk we had cleared Bullock’s acreage without her saying a word, and I therefore didn’t think I ought to, but it finally occurred to me that maybe she was being polite and just waiting for me to begin. Being with respectable women made me real nervous.
I finally says, “Mr. Bullock’s crop looks good,” meaning the nice stand of wheat we had just got beyond. It was all buffalo grass from there to the horizon, level as a body of water. “Makes me feel my years. I come this way as a boy, on the wagons. You wouldn’t then have thought you’d ever see farms here.”
Amanda nodded but said nothing. I should mention we was walking side by side at her pace, which was right brisk, and while in this part there wasn’t no actual road yet, there was a trail what had been made maybe for centuries by buffalo and other animals now gone, so the plains wasn’t ever exactly trackless even to white men.
“In them days,” I went on, “you might encounter a herd of buffalo that filled the world, or you might not see any at all for weeks, and most of the time you’d never run into an Indian, but then all of a sudden there would come a little band, always seemingly from noplace, though you could see in all directions for miles.”
She nods again, like she’s not really listening, and then says, “Tell me: are your boys making progress in English?”
“They’re coming along,” I says. “Probably doing as well as can be expected.” If your expectations was nil, as I didn’t add.
“Why are they so difficult? We are not their enemies.” She asked this earnestly, not with annoyance.
“It’s got to do with their manhood. They can’t prove it in war any more, and they can’t even hunt while they’re here.”
“I don’t like to find fault with Indians,” Amanda says, “but we must show them that shedding blood should have nothing to do with being a man.”
This of course was said by someone who was not of the male sex. If she had created men they would have been nicer than the ones turned out by God.
“That’ll take a bit of doing,” I says.
“But it must and will be done.” Amanda spoke firmly, compressing her pale lips.
Walking along at her pace under a bright sun built up quite a lot of heat in a person, and I was sweating, though you’d never know it was hot looking at Amanda, who wasn’t carrying a parasol like ladies did in town or even wearing a hat. Maybe that wealth of gold hair afforded protection, for the skin of her forehead stayed uncolored. She made quite a contrast when standing next to Mrs. Stevenson, and the latter once beamed at her in my presence and said, “Honey, I guess they couldn’t make ’em any whiter ’n’ you.” I don’t mean she looked unhealthy by any means. I found her real attractive, and the longer I knowed her, all the more so. Which don’t mean I had any ideas of doing anything with regard to her except taking these walks, for after several of them she didn’t pay no more personal attention to me than she ever had, and I never made a practice of making an advance upon a lady without getting some suggestion she would not find it repulsive.
Amanda seemed to accept my company easily enough, but I had the feeling that if I hadn’t showed up some Saturday when she was setting out, she never would of looked around to see if I was on my way. As yet I had an unusual association with this girl, unlike any other I had experienced, but I believed this was due to her living a privileged life in a family that was rich and high class by my standards, whereas consider my own situation. There wasn’t no reason why she should be interested in me unless she wanted to hear some of my colorful history, but she never showed any curiosity as to how I become fluent in the Cheyenne language. As to my participation in battles and being an intimate of gun-fighters, well, I have spoke of her disapproval of bloodletting, so there wasn’t much of my experience I could have related for her pleasure. Or so I thought anyway, disregarding my association with harlots, which was not all that extensive given the place and time. But even had it been otherwise, Amanda Teasdale would not of been the person I would normally have discussed the subject with. In them days a man didn’t speak about sexual matters with a female person, certainly not a respectable one like a wife, if you had such, or a sweetheart, but not even much with the kind of woman you could buy though you might well use a reasonable amount of foul language in her company. What I mean is, at the risk of being indelicate here, a man would get to the business without talking about it unless there was some dickering as to the fee. Oh, maybe sometimes, with the better type of service, he might get asked if he had a preference. But I sure doubt if any customer of any calico queen of that day was ever questioned as to what he was doing there.
So I’ll admit I was amazed and also shocked when, on one of them walks, Amanda says, in a matter-of-fact way, “Why would a man go to a prostitute?”
Resorting to humor to conceal my embarrassment, I says, “Well, if you don’t want them to shed blood, then that’s all that’s left to do.”
I should mention that Amanda had never shown no sense of humor whatsoever and did not develop one now. In fact she didn’t give any indication she heard my answer, but rather went ahead and give one herself. “Is the urge to dominate women so strong that he will even pay someone to feed it?”
I wasn’t certain what that meant, but given my own joking response, I expect I owed her some tolerance. “Well,” I says, “if you really are puzzled about the matter, it ain’t, isn’t, hard to explain. When a cowboy comes in off the trail, he wants to have some pleasure on the money he earned by the weeks of hard work, so he gets drunk, gambles, and buys some time with a woman. He would no doubt prefer a free example of the last-named, but is not likely to know any decent females in the town to which he has drove the herd, and he’s not going to be there long enough to meet a nice girl in some respectable way, and if he did she’s not going to do what he wants until they get married.” All of this sounded so self-evident to any grown person I couldn’t believe I was explaining it.
Amanda had been listening this time, and when I finished she says, “My father is not a cowboy.”
Once again she had me at a disadvantage. I thought I must of misheard. Young women didn’t speak of their father and sex at the same time. As I say, they didn’t speak of the latter at all, especially to someone they hardly knowed. But now we was in sight of the cottonwood grove at the bend of that creek, and you might need some experience of the plains to know how welcome a sight a tree is after miles of horizontal country, across which the winds blow incessantly, taking me back to memories of my early boyhood with the covered wagon. I was also looking forward to a drink of water.
“We’re here already,” I says.
But Amanda stuck to her point. “He has bullied my mother all her adult life, he bullies my sisters and of course the women who work for him at the bank. Yet all of that is not enough.”
I guess I had heard her rightly but that didn’t mean I wanted to know more of what I considered a distasteful topic. “Look here, Amanda,” I says. “I think I’m the wrong person to be talking to.”
“But you worked at that place.”
“The Lone Star?” I shook my head. “I doubt he goes there. He’d stick out amongst that bunch.” I said that to make her feel better. All kinds come in there to drink or watch the girls dancing, some dressed like merchants and bankers. Not everybody went upstairs with a working woman, but if he did, there was a discreet back stairs to get to by the same route you used to reach the outside urinal. Anyway, I didn’t know her Pa.
“I have followed him,” she said decisively. “And he has stomach trouble and doesn’t drink.”
I was really uncomfortable. “I oughtn’t be listening to this,” I says. “You’d do better to speak to that preacher in Dodge.”
“Why?” Amanda asked. “Is he a customer there too?”
“The preacher?”
“He’s a man, isn’t he?”
“Some of us is stuck with that designation,” says I, with a smile, though I begun to think her strange. “And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“I refuse to believe that.” She pushed her lower jaw forward. “No man has to act like an animal.”
“Then, begging your pardon, you ain’t met some of them I have,” I told her. “Talk about meanness, no animal comes close.”
We had now reached the creekside, under the trees, and I was eager to wet my whistle from the stream, which didn’t have much of a current and in fact was just a few yards wide at this season in its regular channel but would be deeper at the bend and also, in the shade of the cottonwoods, cooler than in the shallow reaches or under the full sunlight. Not that a warm drink was not better than none when you was parched. Sources of water could be few and far between when you traveled across the plains.
“I don’t believe it is natural to have no self-control,” Amanda says. “It is self-indulgence, and men are encouraged in it.”
She might have been correct for all I knowed, but it never made much difference to me by what theory a man was bad—and when I say bad I mean murdering and robbing and so on, not that he overindulged in women or whiskey—but only what I had to do to defend my own interests against him, which included them of those close to me, and by golly if I didn’t get a chance to do so sooner than expected.
The way I would of gotten a drink for myself was just to squat down and take handfuls from the stream, but that seemed too crude in front of a lady, as would taking a hatful, which incidentally was a good way to cool off, by wearing it after you had drunk the contents, letting what water remained run down your face and neck. You see how coarse a man I was at the time, but the thing was, I was ever trying to better myself.
Now, while I was pondering on this matter, with Amanda going on about what was wrong with men, I heard a horse coming about a quarter mile off. I would of heard it long before that had the wind been blowing to instead of away from me. It was walking with a gait that told me it was real tired from having previously been rode hard. Movie horses are rid at full gallop mile after mile, but real ones can’t do that. Also they can’t gulp a lot of water (which unless stopped they will do and kill themselves) until they cool down some, so this one was being restrained by his rider from dashing up to the creek, which he could smell. I hadn’t had a mount of my own for a time, but a few years behind a saloon bar didn’t affect my hearing and knowledge of horses, in both of which I had been trained by the Cheyenne.
When the hoof sounds got within a hundred yards I assumed Amanda could hear them as well as me, so I did not state the obvious, but I did want to take a drink of water before a blown horse shoved his lathered face in the creek.
“Pardon,” I told her, squatting down on the bank, “but I’m real thirsty, and they’ll be here in a minute.”
She frowned like she didn’t know what I was talking about. I scooped up a handful of water and slurped it, something I had done hundreds of times, when I hadn’t just stuck my mouth in and drank like a beast, but never before did I notice what a hoggish sound it made. At least I wiped my mouth on the bandanna I carried up one coat sleeve as a kerchief and not with the back of my hand.
By now the rider was just entering the trees, but Amanda still didn’t notice till I said, “We got a visitor.”
She finally turns around. The man was tall in the stirrups and riding a big bay, which as I expected looked worn out by recent exertion and was straining to reach the water.
“How do,” he says politely, even touching the broad brim of his hat, which was pulled so far down I couldn’t see but two glittering eyes and the big mustache many including me wore at this time.
We returned his greeting, Amanda even adding a pretty smile I was not familiar with, she being habitually down in the mouth. Two unholstered pistols was stuck in this fellow’s waistband, and the butt of a rifle extended up from the scabbard hung from the saddle ahead of his right knee. Judging from the size of its handle, the knife in his right boot was considerable.
Whilst I was giving him the once-over, he was doing the same to me and could see I had no visible weapons. Fact is, I didn’t have any hidden, either. The hideout derringer I had carried in Dodge I had sold to one of the other bartenders. Needing such money as I could collect before leaving town, in view of the low wages the school offered, I had also sold my Colt’s to a cowboy. And my Indian knife was stuck in the doorjamb back there at the dormitory. I was dressed in my good clothes, black suit and string tie and all, for that’s what you wore when walking out with a girl even on a dusty trail, leisure attire being as yet unknown.
Now you might ask why the matter of weapons would come up at all when some fellow just stopped to water his horse from a stream that was free for all to use at will. I’ll tell you. This man had come from a westerly direction, and it was early afternoon, with the sun high above and behind him, so he wouldn’t be looking at it, yet that hat brim of his was pulled down so far you couldn’t see much of his visage, and in fact I noticed him giving it a further tug when entering under the trees, the kind of thing you’d do when you didn’t want your face to be clearly noticed. You might say, well maybe that was just his personal style, to which my answer would be, sure, but he was carrying four visible weapons while I had none, and with a woman to look after. For having run his eyes over me to see what I was carrying, he put them on Amanda and went real slow all across her person, and on her he was not looking for weapons.
This kind of thing with a woman in the company of another man was normally a deliberate provoking of the latter if he was armed. In this case he was dismissing me as if I wasn’t there, weaponless as I was.
Amanda, for all her gassing about men in the general sense, never seen what was dangerous in this specimen, but kept smiling at him. She never knowed that might seem immodest to a man of this kind, and her not wearing a sunbonnet made it more so.
He finally let his straining horse get to the creek and drink, at an angle where he could keep us in view without turning too far in the saddle.
“I think I’ll just give you a ride, sweetheart,” he says, grinning with a set of yellowed teeth stained in streaked brown. “Wouldjoo like that?”
Now there was no mistaking his meaning, but I’ll be damned if Amanda did not keep smiling at him prettily as ever. “No, thank you,” says she. “This walk is the only exercise I get all week, and I look forward to it.” I wasn’t too pleased she didn’t include me in her remarks, though I wasn’t being any help to her so far.
The man on the horse got nastier, saying, “Don’t you sass me, little bitch. When I say I’m gonna do somethin’, I goddam do it.” And then he curses further, which I can’t abide in front of a lady. But he is armed to the teeth and on top of a horse.
I never been one to squander myself at hopeless odds, and I don’t know what I would of done had Amanda not been there—though if she had not, this particular problem would not of come up. The fact remained that Amanda was there, and this bastard had insulted her and would surely do worse when he felt like it.
So I says, maybe foolishly, but I couldn’t come up with anything better at that moment, I says, hitching up my sleeves, “Git down here and fight like a man.”
He snorts and utters more filth. “Where’s the man to fight me?” He makes that kind of laugh that is noise only and no facial expression, and pulls one of them pistols from his waistband but don’t point it yet, just holds it in his clenched hand resting on top of the saddle horn.
Before I could try something else, whatever that might of been, Amanda goes up to the horse, using a funny kind of walk I never seen on her before, fact is, not on any woman, for a saloon girl’s type of approach was a good deal less smooth. However, I soon realized she was giving him a come-on, damned if she were not.
“Don’t be so impatient,” she tells him in a slow, low voice I had never heard before either, going with that slinky walk. “I haven’t said no.”
I couldn’t know then if she had give up on me and was doing this to save herself from an even worser fate or was playing for time while I tried a tactic more effective than I had done yet, but at that moment I never thought of either possibility or aught else but rage that this fine girl was lowering herself before a low-down skunk like that.
So I rushed him, and he lifted his gun and shot me... well, shot at me and would of been dead on the line of my heart had Amanda not grabbed that bowie from out of his boot and stuck the blade through the boot and into the calf of his right leg just as he was squeezing the trigger, throwing off his aim so the slug missed my heart by just enough to go between my ribs and my left arm, tearing my one and only coat but sparing my flesh.
The horse shied and reared, like it had been the one hurt, and swung around, knocking Amanda to the ground. The villain had that rifle and still another pistol, and I was unarmed as ever, and would pretty surely have been drilled by him at that point, for his finger was about to squeeze the trigger again when, with a war cry I knew of old, a naked brown figure, coming from no place, vaulted on to the horse’s back just behind him, grabbing his chin and raising it, and then cut his throat from ear to ear.
Spewing blood out the slashed neck, the body lost its hat and toppled off the horse and onto the ground, not too far from where Amanda was just rising from her fall, and she gets spattered with gore.
The loinclothed savage leaps down quick, kneels, and run his knife around the skull of the corpse, whose bleary right eye was yet open and whose left boot was still twitching, rips off the scalp with that sound you don’t forget if you ever heard it, and holds it aloft, dripping, and again makes that Cheyenne cry, which will send a chill up your back.
It is Wolf Coming Out. And now his pals appear, Goes in Sweat and Walks Last. I should have been embarrassed not to of gotten no sense of their presence back of the trees, had I not been earlier so occupied with my predicament. But I sure did not think I had done well. First Amanda saved my bacon and then this Indian boy.
Speaking of Amanda, she were stretched out on the ground again. I reckon she fainted when that bleeding body flopped down near her, either then or when young Wolf ripped its scalp off.
I knelt down and was starting to clean off the blood on her with my wetted bandanna when she came to, saw what I was doing, and indignantly pushed me away as if I was taking advantage to illicitly paw her person. Then she sees them boys in their breechcloths listening to Wolf’s boasts about his deed, which is standard Indian procedure on a victory, and though she can’t understand the heathen words, she gets their sentiment, and she all but faints again.
I help Amanda to her feet, without a protest this time. In fact, she’s holding tight on to my arm. But once she’s standing she shakes me off, takes a look at the body, which is still leaking blood at the throat and shows a raw red patch where a head of hair used to be, and she lights with fury into Wolf Coming Out.
“You killed him!” she screeches. “You wicked, wicked boy, you have killed a man.”
What I told him in Cheyenne was, “You have done well. The woman is very pleased you saved her from being mistreated by a bad person.”
Amanda kept screaming for a while, but after another look at the corpse, she ran behind the biggest cottonwood and, I judge, heaved.
Wolf shows me his weapon, the bright blood on which he is reluctant to clean off. “You were right,” he says, “this knife has powerful medicine. To celebrate this great victory I present you with the scalp of your enemy.” And he hands me that slimy object, a shock of hair so dirty I had rather hold it by the gory base.
It was a real generous gesture, for which I thanked him, saying I would add it to my medicine bundle, a private and usually secret collection of talismans an Indian keeps as a defense against bad spirits, this to explain ahead of time why he wouldn’t be seeing it again, whereas what I purposed to do, and in fact did a little later, was sneak it back onto the corpse’s skull while still moist enough to stick, so as to avoid embarrassing questions before the body got safely buried.
Meanwhile I had to fold the thing, skin side in, and put it in my pocket, for Amanda was returning now, her face paler than ever. Throwing up had relieved her of some of her earliest feelings, and what she says sternly now, including the other two boys, was “What were you doing off school grounds without permission? And what are you doing out of uniform?”
“Let it go, Amanda,” I told her. “The boy just saved your virtue and my life.”
She turned her rage on me. “You don’t know that. I could have dealt with him. Women go through that sort of thing with men all their lives. He didn’t frighten me.”
“No, I sure saw he did not,” I agreed. “That was great, stabbing his leg like that. I’m mighty grateful to you for spoiling his aim. It was you who saved my life first.” I did think her a marvel, a young girl from a good family, handling herself so well in a violent situation.
But she wasn’t pacified. “He did not have to be killed!”
Meanwhile Wolf had found the pistols dropped by the dead man, as well as the bowie discarded by Amanda.
“Just a minute,” I told her, and to Wolf I said in Cheyenne, “You earned those weapons by combat, but you are not among the Human Beings right now. You are a boy and a student at a white man’s school, and you may not possess those weapons. The same rule applies to the rifle on the horse. But I will arrange for them to be kept until you are ready to leave the school and go home and then be given to you.”
He frowned, but next his brown brow cleared, and he said with evident pleasure in his black eyes, “Then I will go home soon?”
“I don’t know how soon, but you’ll be going home sometime. Where else would you go when you finished school?”
“We thought we would be killed,” he says blandly. Which goes to demonstrate a red man’s process of mind: white people would take all the trouble to run a school and deal for months trying to get students like himself to learn something, only to put them to death at the end. But you must understand they seen whites kill thousands of buffalo for the hides alone, leaving all the fine meat to rot on the ground, and then send the skins away, not even using them so far as could be noticed. And build a noisy, dirty railroad, the cars of which could only run in a straight line, so if the smallest object lay on the track the train couldn’t go around it. And wear continuous pants, crotch joined to the legs, so if a white man wanted to make water, he had to tear open the front seam, and to drop his dung he had to let down the entire garment. For an Indian there was endless examples of how whites didn’t make sense, not the least of which was they let their women run them.
The dead man’s horse had not been scared away by the commotion and the loss of its master but had just moved a few feet away, where it was standing calmly. I took the Winchester from the boot, and while I was there I opened and looked through the saddlebag on the right side, and the first thing I found was a folded poster showing torn nail holes. I opened it up and seen someone named Elmo Cullen was wanted for murder and armed robbery. A bank in Grand Island, Nebraska, offered $500 for his capture dead or alive. Cullen was described as about 5 foot, 10 inches, weight 165, age 31, “dark complected, heavy long dirty brown mustache, hair dark brown, probably clean shaven, bowlegged.”
I took the poster over to the body on the ground, which could have been that of a bounty hunter looking for Cullen. Kind of hard to tell about the bowlegs in his present state, but the rest of the description seemed to fit.
I handed the poster to Amanda, who was still complaining, and said, “Looks like the school’s got some money coming.”
I suppose it was to her credit that though commonly mercenary for that cause she did not immediately change her tune now. She even added to it something about blood money. But I’ll say this for Amanda, by time me and the boys had slung the body over the horse and hauled it into town to the sheriff, she agreed with my simplified story of the episode as being pure defense of her virtue on my part, against an armed criminal from whose boot I was able to pull his bowie, but not without almost being shot through the heart by him, of which I could show the rip in my coat.
I left the Cheyenne boys out of it, for nothing but trouble would of come from them attacking even a criminal white man to save two other whites. At least I never wanted to chance it. So far as the sheriff knowed, them students, dressed the way they was for a school pageant, had just helped us bring in the body, which was Cullen, for in one of his pockets the sheriff found a tattered letter from his old Ma, back in Missouri, asking for money, along with an indecent photo of some woman taken in a red-light house, I expect, with “oil my luve to Elmo” scrawled between her naked spread thighs and signed Saginaw Sal.
Cullen’s horse turned out to be stole from the man he had killed outside the bank he had robbed in Nebraska and had to be returned to the widow. None of the cash he had took from the bank turned up on his person. I believe that sheriff thought it possible I might of helped myself to it. He allowed as how he might have fifty dollars coming from the reward for the costs of identification, telegraphing Grand Island, et cetera, so we let him keep that, and the rest when it come was presented to the Major for the school, by me but in the name of Wolf Coming Out, who never made a claim for any part of the money, on account of he still didn’t understand or care what an important place money occupied in civilization, for him and the other boys had not acquired much of the latter from their classes.
You take history, which was taught by a woman with little squinty eyes and a mumbly voice, who was named Miss Gilhooley, which I gave up trying to get the boys to pronounce when they couldn’t get closer than Grr-who. I ain’t going to go through the details of how what she taught in class was transmitted by me to them, but though not literal in the word-for-word, I was careful with the facts, and learned some history myself while so doing. But what would come back when them young Indians was quizzed might be hard to recognize.
All of this was by mouth, for of course they couldn’t write. Stands Like a Bear’s version of the Revolutionary War: “George Washington stole a horse and rode around telling the Americans that they would all get new red coats if they agreed not to drink any more tea. So they all got drunk on whiskey and started fighting.” Walks Last said the Civil War was caused by a big argument between Abraham Lincoln, who was a Black White Man, and President Grant, over a woman.
You might say they didn’t care much about white history for it seemed to have no reference to their own lives, but what they was taught about geography, by a big hefty female named Bertha Wadleigh, bothered them boys, especially when she hung a long roll on a couple of nails above the blackboard and pulled down from it a flexible map printed on oilcloth, which was a wonder to them insofar as it was taken as a bright-colored decoration. But when she said it was a picture of the part of the earth on which we lived, in this case North America, them Cheyenne believed she was lying, though for a reason they couldn’t comprehend, because walking the same earth as them, she hadn’t nothing to gain from pretending it was actually a piece of cloth hanging on a wall.
They was getting so riled up about the matter that I thought they might get into trouble, so I just told them Miss Wadleigh was a crazy person who was given this silly job to keep her busy in a harmless way, which is what Indians kindly do to their own nutcases. So once again I weren’t no help in what this school was trying to accomplish, and I tell you my conscience was not at peace, especially when it come to the religious classes, which was given by the Major himself. Them boys could readily accept Mary’s giving birth though a virgin and Jesus’ rising from the dead, and anything else in the realm of the miraculous, like walking on water, turning water into wine, and so on, but they never could make any sense of the central of all Christian beliefs, that God, who ran everything in the world, would let bad people crucify His son, and trying to tell them it was to save everybody from their sins only made it more incredible. Why didn’t God just do away with sin?
Well, I have got sidetracked from completing the account of that incident concerning the wanted man Elmo Cullen and its consequence. How’d them boys happen to be out there by the creek to give us a helping hand? For in doing so, they was breaking the school rules for Saturdays, like Amanda had noted, which afternoons they had off from classes but was expected to stay on the school grounds and play sports, which meant mostly baseball, for that was the only kind of equipment the school possessed at the moment, and not enough even so. The one bat was soon broke, after which they used axe handles and the like, but the one ball was finally beat to a state that it could not be stuck together any more, and the substitutes made of wood or tight-wrapped rawhide never were satisfactory. Anyhow, only eighteen players could be in the game at any one time, which meant the rest of the male students had nothing to do but watch, which didn’t long maintain the interest of the Cheyenne, who took the opportunity to slip away into the country and play make-believe war, until Cullen showed up and they had somebody to rub out in reality.
Try as I did to explain their ways to Amanda, I can’t say she ever found the episode acceptable, even though the Major did, who had been a soldier both in the Civil and the Indian wars, seeing lots of violent deaths and, even as a Christian, having no objection to the death of an enemy in a good cause.
Now I haven’t said much about the other students at the school, some of which done a lot better than my boys at picking up what was taught, and most learned passable English, especially the girls. I don’t want you to think the place was an absolute flop by any means. There was at least one boy from my time, an Osage if memory serves, who went on to become a doctor amongst his people, and a couple others become preachers in their tribes, and some of the girls went on to teach at reservation schools and be nurses at hospitals for Indians. I never heard of any who got positions in the white world. I guess that practical experience at cookery and, for the boys, plowing, shoeing horses, bailing hay, and so on might have paid off when they tried to make a go of it back home as farmers.
As I said before, it was normal for an Indian from a warlike tribe to boast of such violence as he wreaked on enemies, and such was not looked upon as a blowhard like he might of been with whites, maybe because I never knowed a redskin who told untruths in so doing, whereas with American braggarts the first thing that occurs to you on hearing them is they’re probably lying, else they wouldn’t have to praise themselves. So young Wolf Coming Out, he sure let the other students hear about his feat, notwithstanding that he didn’t speak a word of anything but Cheyenne, and I don’t know if I ever mentioned one of the singular facts about Indians was every little tribe had its own peculiar tongue, which frequently was incomprehensible to the tribe right next door, and so the sign language was invented. But words never meant much to young people of any race I was ever acquainted with. I gathered that the others learned as much about the killing of the white desperado as they could have been told, making the other boys real jealous and impressing the girls, which was the desired result.
I saw to it that the medicine knife was returned to its perch on the doorjamb outside my room, never to be taken away again short of another life-or-death situation.
Now, Cheyenne maidens was renowned for their chastity and their courting could be as long and involved with rules as that of Miss Millicent Chutney by Mr. John Longworth Whitfellow, in Boston. But the boys was not obliged to take a similar care with the honor of females from other tribes (like the lads of the three major religions when going interfaith), so the schoolgirls, none of which was Cheyenne, was fair game, as they was to the boys of all the other tribes, which accounted for the solid walls between the two halves of the dormitory building and the separate entrances. The sexes was also kept apart at meals and in recreation, for it was the Major’s theory that nothing was more likely to impede the progress of civilization amongst young barbarians than access of male and female to one another before proper marriage by a Christian preacher and not the heathen connection made without benefit of clergy in which these young folk had been conceived by their parents.
I have said that another of the small male staff was a German what taught arithmetic, name of Klaus Kappelhaus. He was also in charge of the ground-floor dormitory and, even though near as I could understand he had emigrated to avoid military service in the Old Country, he maintained an even stricter discipline over his boys than the Major asked, among other things making them polish their shoes in unison each night before going to bed and on arising in the morning recite by heart long sections of the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, General George Washington’s farewell address to his troops, etc., all of which Klaus had himself memorized before becoming a citizen. The accuracy of his memory had to be taken on faith by most folks, for his accent was so thick he could be saying almost anything. His version of the Declaration began something like, “Van in duh coze of hoomahn ayffents....”
I generally kept out of Klaus’s way, for like everybody I have ever knowed who was hard to comprehend by reason of accent, speech impediment, or mouth wound, he loved to talk a lot. But this one evening after the boys was supposed to have gone to bed—though in my case, not being a German, I wasn’t strict about the exact schedule, so long as all lamps and candles was out, for safety from fire—I come down to have a smoke out front of the building, again for safety’s sake, for when sitting alone at the end of day with a pipe in my mouth I had acquired a tendency to nod, and a few times the lighted pipe had fell into my lap with a spray of sparks. After all, I was approaching the then substantial age of forty, which looking back was only a little more than a third of my life, but how was I to know that at the time?
So there I was, puffing away and watching the lightning bugs flash over the little patch of lawn that had finally took hold but had to be hand-watered frequently by the students, which seemed foolish to them because it wasn’t an edible crop and a near drought was always in progress thereabouts.
“Check,” says somebody in a harsh whisper behind me, and before turning I recognized it as my name as pronounced by Klaus Kappelhaus, which was useful because aside from the glowing bugs there wasn’t much light from the overcast sky and none from the dormitory behind him. (His version of my whole name was Check Grobb.)
“Just going in, Klaus,” says I, tapping out against an uplifted boot heel what remained of the tobacco embers.
“Check,” says Klaus, “iss any of your boyss shneeking into duh girlss’ side?” I am purposely making this easier to understand here than it was in reality. Believe me when I say each speech of his was a struggle for me.
“I don’t expect so, Klaus,” I tells him. “For not only do I keep my door open but I’m a real light sleeper.” And I adds, “Plus any such would have to go all the way downstairs past Charlevoix’s floor and then through yours, then get into the girls’ side without being detected by Bertha Wadleigh.” Who was the ground-floor guardian next door, and a hefty person who made even Klaus uncomfortable to be near, for she was husky enough to whip him in a fair fight.
“Check,” says Klaus, “duh girl got shits.”
I wondered why I had to hear that. “It ain’t like Mrs. Stevenson to cook bad food. It’s probably something they ate on their own, green apples maybe.”
“Check,” says Klaus, “she lets duh shits down from duh vindow.”
For a minute I still didn’t get it. Then: “You mean the girl drops tied-up sheets from a window?”
“Eggzackly! He climbs opp.”
“You seen him in the act?”
It was too dark to clearly see his expression, but I reckon he was shocked by the question. “No, I have not zeen dem fickling, and I don’t vantto!”
Klaus didn’t always get an American turn of speech and had therefore believed “act” meant more than my reference to climbing. I straightened him out on the matter and then asked if the sheets was lowered tonight.
“In duh beck.” He meant the back of the building, where he had just come from as I came out the front.
So we went through the ground-floor hallway and out the rear door. The night wasn’t any lighter back there, but with that trick of looking not directly at the object of your interest but rather just to the side of it, I could just make out a long twisted kind of rope made of knotted—they wasn’t sheets, which in fact the students were not given and, at least with my boys, wouldn’t of used even when the use was explained—blankets is what was tied end to end and hung from a window from the top floor boys’ quarters, dangling a couple feet from the ground. And over on the girls’ part, another such come down from a window on the second floor.
I had to get the young fellow, whoever he was, out of there before an alarm was raised that reached the Major, who was dead set against any kind of sexual activity for anybody and in the case of his students for all I knew would prescribe the firing squad. At the least he’d expel the offenders, who must then go home in shame, having disgraced their tribes in front of the whites. That’s sure how the Cheyenne would see it.
“I’ll shinny up,” I told Klaus. “God knows how long he’ll stay up there otherwise.” Before the climb, I squeezed a promise out of Klaus, which wasn’t easy on account of how he was about discipline, to let me handle the punishment of the miscreant my own way and not inform the Major or anybody else on the staff. I admit I made use of my boys’ rep for savagery, Klaus after all having fled the Old Country to avoid the warlike.
So I goes up the blanket-rope, which was the easiest part of this mission, and I clumb over the windowsill. By now my eyes was adjusted to the night and I could see some, dark as it was, but him I was looking for would of been easy to spot in any event, for he was grunting like a rutting animal. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer than I was, for I right away suspected it would be Wolf Coming Out, him having got his man and thus the admiration of them Indian girls, to which he was like a matinee idol would be for white maidens, and no male person can resist taking advantage of such an opportunity.
Now I go over to where he is covering the girl, who I can hardly discern, and in as low a voice as could be I announce myself and call him off.
But Wolf don’t stop what he’s about nor even change his rhythm, but just says, breathing quick, I should take as his gift any of the other girls in the room, for they all belong to the bravest warrior in the school, namely himself.
So I see strong measures are required, and I haul off and give him such a kick in his naked arse on that low cot that he goes sprawling across the girl, and then with a choke hold I drag him off and onto his feet, where he tries to wrestle, at which Cheyenne boys is pretty good, but they never understood the principle of fist-fighting, so it was easy enough to give him a right uppercut onto the glass jaw all Indians have (as opposed to their granite skulls), and he hits the floor dead to the world.
I pulled the makeshift rope up and inside, run it around his chest under the armpits, and tied it tight. Then I took off my belt and put it around his body to hold the wrists at hip-level, so his arms wouldn’t raise when he was lowered on the rope.
Then, using the leverage of the windowsill, I let him slowly down until he hung close to the ground, where Klaus could let him loose.
While I was occupied with this effort, my pants, too loose at the waist to stay up without a belt or galluses, began to move south, and when I straightened up and was preparing to slide down the rope now Wolf was clear, my trousers plunged to my ankles, right at the moment a delegation of female staff members entered the room, each carrying a lighted oil lamp and headed by the burly figure of Bertha Wadleigh. What happened was Dorothea Hupple, the staff monitor for this floor, had been woke up, behind a closed door, by the noise of Wolf’s rutting and, scared, had already went down to fetch the others before I arrived.
Now Wolf had been saved, but I was the one in trouble, all the more so because I never had no drawers on, owing to the fact that with the weather too hot for longjohns I hadn’t found the time yet to go into the drygoods shop in town and buy summer garments. I should of worn a Cheyenne-style breechcloth! So you can imagine what it looked like I had been up to, in that dormitory full of Indian girls, who had probably been awake all the time but only now begun to giggle and chatter.
Seeing me, Dorothea Hupple let out a scream and almost dropped her lamp, but big Bertha advanced on me like a mad bull, being about that size.
“Now, wait a minute,” I says, having pulled up my pants, “I can—”
But didn’t get no further before Bertha shifted her lamp to the left hand and slugged me in the jaw with her ham-sized right. I went down.
Standing over me, she glowers down in the lamplight. “Beastly little man! The Major will put you in prison for this.”
I roll-dodged the kick she sent my way with a big slippered foot, and quick got up before she could launch another, clutching the waist of my pants, which was threatening to fall again. She and them others was wearing what respectable women put on for bed in them days, which was no less modest or voluminous than the daytime garb, and they had dressing gowns on top of that, but aside from Bertha they all acted like I had caught them naked.
“Hold on,” I says to Bertha and included the rest. “This looks like what it isn’t.” But then I reflected that having gone to so much trouble to save Wolf, I could hardly implicate him now. “You just ask these girls if I touched any of them” was the best I could come up with, and it didn’t do much for my case, for Bertha allowed as how she had got there just in time to stop me from forcible rape.
That girl Wolf had been topping, who I got a look at finally, had pulled the skirt of her nightgown down and was pretending, alone in the room, to be fast asleep. I believe she was a Kiowa. Wolf wouldn’t have knowed a word of her language, but never had to.
Bertha says, “Dorothea, go run for the Major and tell him to bring his gun.”
“You want me shot?” I asks.
“You vile little runt,” Bertha says, thrusting her big square jaw my way, but I never thought about returning the punch, not wanting to break my hand. “You think this doesn’t matter, because they’re just Indian girls?”
I could of told her I once had a Cheyenne wife, and a baby what was half Indian blood, but when they’re that riled people don’t want to hear reasons why they shouldn’t be, so I never bothered. But I sure wasn’t going to wait around for more abuse, even if I was pretty certain the Major wouldn’t shoot me.
I straddled the windowsill and then went down that blanket-rope while holding my pants up with one hand and braking my descent with the other and my knees. I probably arrived at the ground before them ladies started downstairs.
Klaus was still there, along with a groggy Wolf Comes Out. I quickly explained to the former what had happened, and reclaimed my belt. I was in too much of a hurry to wait while Klaus reacted in his Dutch version of English, but got from Wolf a promise not to say anything about the evening’s events if asked, which he probably wouldn’t be.
“I’m sorry I had to hit you,” I told him. “I have to go now.”
Being an Indian, what he said in return was only “I hear you.” He knew if I wanted to say more, I would of done so. Since I didn’t, it wasn’t his place to bring it up.
I then departed that school in the dead of night, ending my term there under a cloud of disgrace. I tell you this: I wouldn’t have went away in that fashion, as if admitting my shame, but for one consideration. I would of stayed and defended myself, and without betraying Wolf Comes Out too, for I can be right inventive when the need arises, but I knew that one person would never believe a word of mine, and I don’t mean Bertha Wadleigh. I just couldn’t bear to face the disdain of Amanda Teasdale.