Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  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.