Armstrong

by H. W. Crocker

The chief held out a savage knife, like a primitive Bowie knife, handle forward. With my hands still bound, I couldn’t take it, but that seemed to be the idea.

  “He says that while the Boyanama Sioux celebrate a great victory, they also mourn for the loss of their braves, including my . . . my former husband. He says that, as my slave, you must assist in my mourning. You must take this knife and cut a top knuckle from one of my fingers.”

  A feeling of revulsion shot through my body like a sudden wave of fever; every sinew of manliness within me was aroused against this outrage; and I glared at the chief as I had glared at few men in my life. For I knew exactly what he meant; I had seen Indians in mourning before: they scarify their faces, arms, and bodies with knives, dull knives, wielded not with the skill of a surgeon but with the brute stupidity of a savage. It is not uncommon for a widowed spouse to lop off the first joint of her little finger. When the wound heals, the skin retracts and the remaining bone protrudes in a most revolting way. I would not let that happen to Scalp-Not-My-Woman.

  “You fiendish dog of hell,” I said. “I will not—and you will not—touch one hair of that woman. If you need some sacrifice, take it not from the hands of she-who-should-remain-unblemished, take it from . . . my moustache!”

  “But Golden Hair . . .”

  “Tell him!”

  “Awahuh!” All the Indians were astonished—except for Linewalker. He showed no emotion but eyed me beadily.

  “He says you find Boyanama Sioux customs bestial.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “He says, ‘But you will soon be one of us.’ ”

  “If that is so, tell him, it is by compulsion—and I can only hope that I can make him and his people the better for it.”

  “He says you are arrogant—but brave.”

  “I fear no man.”

  The chief came towards me, flipped the knife around so that its blade faced me, and, with a sudden violence I didn’t expect, raked it across my left shoulder. I couldn’t help but recoil when he pressed his rubbery lips to the wound, sucked blood, and spat it at the spear point between my feet.

  Then he shouted something and the knife was above my nose, as though he intended to plunge it between my eyes. But instead he paused, made the slightest incision in my forehead and another on his palm, and clasped that hand to my brow, chanting some words as he did so.

  He barked another order and a brave cut me loose from the stake. The chief slit his own forearm. He motioned for me to extend mine. He slit it and we shook hands in the manner of the ancient Romans, forearm to forearm.

  “He says he will spare my finger as a courtesy to you, as you are now a blood brother of the Boyanama Sioux. He says you will kill the Indians no more forever.”

  “Tell him that I am a man of my word, and if those are the terms of my parole, I accept them.”

  The chief shouted at me and gave me a ceremonial punch to the chest. I gulped hard to keep from spitting blood. Then he turned to his braves, gave them a one-minute hellfire sermon (at least that’s what it sounded like), and as they gathered round, yippying like dancing devils, he passed through them, broken nose held high.

  “It is done,” Scalp-Not-My-Woman said. “Thank goodness that’s over. There is already a tepee set aside for us.”

  “For us?”

  “Remember, you are my slave.”

  “Oh, yes, yes of course, ma’am.”

  You can imagine how discomfited I was to become the slave of a beautiful woman—even if she had saved my life. Still, I had no choice but to follow her into her relatively charming little tepee—much nicer than that filthy wikiup of the tattooist. There were even two bearskin rugs laid upon the earth. We reclined on them. Her Indian husband must have been a man of prominence.

  “He was,” she said. “He was the son of Chief Linewalker.”

  Well, that threw me. I couldn’t image such an accommodation in the white world. You kill a man’s son, you become a slave to his daughter-in-law, and you get inducted as the old man’s blood brother. No one can deny the Indians have their points.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Now you do as I say.”

  “What happens when the Army comes looking for me?”

  “They won’t. We put another golden hair in your place. Those are his buckskins.” She pointed to a neatly laid out uniform behind the bear rug. “They are now yours. You will wear them. His hair was cut short, like yours.”

  “There’s more to me than hair and clothes.”

  She gave me a baleful glare. “You’ve seen an Indian battlefield—not just the scalps but the bellies ripped open, the unspeakable things they do. Bodies full of arrows, lining them like porcupine quills. Heads, arms, hands, and legs chopped off. Knives plunged into eyes. Tongues ripped out. That didn’t happen to this man; we guarded him. He was shot in two places, but his body wasn’t desecrated. They only plunged awls in his ears to aid his hearing in the afterlife—or that’s what the Indians think. Your scouts will mark it as a sign of respect. He wasn’t mutilated—so he can be identified as you.”

  “But they’ll know it’s not me.”

  “He fooled the Cheyenne women; he’ll fool your army. I knew him well—he was a slave too.”

  “Now hold on there, Scalp-Not-My-Woman . . .”

  “Call me Rachel.”

  “I’m not calling anyone who keeps white men as slaves Rachel.”

  “He was captured and spared on my word. He was another soldier, or a former one, maybe a deserter. They found him riding in the Black Hills.”

  “So, you’re the Pocahontas of the Plains. Any other white slaves around here?”

  “No—unless you consider me; and I wish you would.”

  “There was no initiation for you?”

  “Not the kind you had. Another of my names is Tattoo-Not-My-Woman-On-Her-Face-On-Her-Arms-On-Her-Legs-On-Her . . .”

  “I get the idea. You were too valuable as is.”

  “I think you’ll find me very valuable too. I can help you escape. We can escape together. They trust me. They still don’t trust you.”

  “Well, that makes us even, because I don’t trust them—not even as blood brothers. And I’m not sure I trust you—though I am indebted to you, ma’am. If it’s not an indelicate question, how many white slaves have you had?”

  “Only two—including you.”

  “And you had my predecessor killed.”

  “I learned how to be cold-hearted from the Indians. It was his life or yours; and he could do nothing for me. You are General Custer. I saw you on the battlefield. I saw you kill Bearstalker. I saw you fight as bravely as any man has ever fought. You can rescue me.”

  “And what about my look-alike?”

  “He had hair like yours. But he didn’t have your spirit, your strength. Oh, physically he was close enough—close enough to fool a Cheyenne. And anyone who looks for bodies on that horrible battlefield will take him as you; his body was arranged to make it seem so. But really he was not at all like you. He was weak. He was afraid. He was no companion, no leader for an escape. But you are General Custer. You can get me out of this horrible place, away from these horrible Indians.”

  High praise indeed, camped, as we were, among hundreds if not thousands of them; but warranted, I had to grant. “It’ll take some thinking,” I said.

  “But you,” she repeated, “are General Custer. You will find a way.”

  Yes, I thought, I better.

  She was a clever one. Scalp-Not-My-Woman had already secured us two excellent mounts—abandoned cavalry horses that, for my money, were better than the best Indian pony. I inspected the horses while giving the impression to any spying Indians of merely doing my mistress’s bidding, rubbing the horses down and cleaning their hooves. They would do fine.

  The Boyanama Sioux, many of them, were still drunk, literally or figuratively, on their massacre of my troops—dancing and chanting and drumming—and I hated them for it. But the soberer ones, like Linewalker
, were preparing to move—they had apparently moved once already, immediately after the battle; I’d slept through it, unconscious, dragged on a travois. They were expecting vengeance from the U.S. Cavalry, and I hoped that vengeance would soon make its appearance.

  In the meantime, I was busy too. Scalp-Not-My-Woman bossed me like the slave I allegedly was—and I played my part. I had a big audience. Plenty of braves, I noticed, kept an eagle eye on me—whether because they didn’t trust me, or because they wanted to kill me and claim Scalp-Not-My-Woman as their own, or merely out of admiration, I do not know. I wasn’t much interested in making conversation with them. And I doubt that talk was much on their minds either. That’s not the Indian way.

  “Linewalker intends to leave at first light tomorrow,” said Scalp-Not-My-Woman. “Do you have a plan?”

  Sure enough, by now I did. I figured that the worst thing we could do was bolt quickly. Better would be to withdraw with Linewalker and lull him and his braves into thinking I had accepted my lot. When their eyes were less keen, we would slip away on the trail. The Great Sioux Reservation was to our east—and though plenty of vaguely peaceable Sioux would cover for him, I reckoned Linewalker had no intention of going in that direction. Most likely he would head north, maybe all the way to the Canadian border. I didn’t have a map, but I thought our best route of escape was along the Yellowstone River heading west. My goal was Bloody Dick Creek, near Red Butte and Coyote Flats, a place that I had seen on a map before and that I reckoned would put us beyond the reach of the retreating Boyanama Sioux. But our chances depended on how much Linewalker valued his daughter-in-law—and on that point, I was worried.

  The more I got to know her, the whiter Scalp-Not-My-Woman became. She was olive-skinned, whether from the sun or from some Indian dye or because of a tincture of Indian or Spanish blood, I couldn’t say. But I can say that her father had been, of all things, a judge—or so she told me. He had come, idealistically, to bring law to the West and been an itinerant magistrate. A widower, he traveled with his daughter. While riding from one small-town court to another, they were ambushed by a Sioux war party. Bearstalker captured Rachel—a mere girl of sixteen, as she then was—and took her for his squaw.

  Being a judge’s daughter, she was educated and refined, which had made her imprisonment among the Sioux all the more horrible. Still, all in all, they had treated her relatively well, and as Bearstalker’s woman she held authority and respect in the tribe. I had to assume she inspired a mite bit of jealousy as well. And she was as cunning as an Indian. When I told her how we might melt away with the retreat, she nodded and added a touch of her own.

  The morning of our departure, I was awake before the Indians, or most of them. Scalp-Not-My-Woman had brought me breakfast—jerky and a pancake washed down with water—and we were packed and ready to ride. Linewalker, I noticed, kept a beady father-in-law’s eye on us. It was pretty clear my blood brother thought I had tainted blood. From his perspective, he was right.

  The Indian caravan set out at dawn. Their belongings were few and easily transportable. And they kept a sorry camp. They had no concern for good order or cleanliness—and if you don’t care about cleaning up and burying your waste, you can move a lot faster.

  As I predicted, the path went north—and it was only us, the Boyanama Sioux. I had no idea where the other tribes were headed—indeed I saw no other tribes. Our encampment must have been set some ways off from the mass of Sioux and Cheyenne we had battled. I reckoned we had more than two hundred braves and at least as many women and children among us. Scalp-Not-My-Woman and I had started near the vanguard, but slowly—I hoped imperceptibly—we fell back along the trail, until we were near the rear guard by dusk. As dark settled in, Scalp-Not-My-Woman pulled away into a spinney set in a gulley. A brave guarding the tribe’s small remuda rode over to question me.

  I had pledged to kill no more Indians; but I had said nothing about knocking them senseless. So, while he was in mid-guttural interrogation, I struck him full-on with a gloved fist that sent him reeling. He was a young brave, not yet fully grown, and I caught him with my other hand and lifted him onto my horse. I herded his horse and another, cut from the remuda, down to where Scalp-Not-My-Woman was waiting with our little surprise for the Boyanama Sioux.

  She gagged the young brave with her skull-decorated neckerchief and bound his wrists and ankles with strips of rawhide. Then she unloaded the bear rugs she had draped over her horse.

  Stuffed within the rugs were cleverly packaged bundles of clothes and sticks and grass that she quickly fashioned into a dummy woman and a dummy man. We tied the dummies to the two Indian ponies I had brought with me.

  I led the horses back up to the trail and sent them trotting after the remuda. If the Indians were looking for us, and didn’t look too closely in the dark, they might be fooled—or so she thought, and I reckoned she knew the Boyanama Sioux better than I did.

  We remounted our cavalry horses and rode west, riding quietly at first and then at a full gallop in what I guessed was the direction of the Yellowstone River, beyond which was the Idaho Territory. I reached for my locket compass—I wanted to calculate how long it would take us—only to find that, once again, it was missing. And then I realized that I hadn’t seen it since I had been tattooed. I reined up next to Scalp-Not-My-Woman and said, I confess a bit roughly, “Where’s my compass?”

  “Don’t worry; I took care of it.”

  “What do you mean, you took care of it?”

  She looked me straight in the eye and said, “I left it with the old man, the Indian who tattooed you.”

  “You what?”

  “I should have left it on the corpse of the man impersonating you. But as I said, every woman has a heart.”

  “And so you gave it to that lunatic Indian who defaced me for life?”

  “If someone saw it, it would betray your identity.”

  “And I suppose this tattoo doesn’t.”

  “Not in the same way. You can explain that. The tattoo is not as exact. And how many people are going to see it? Anyway, I had to let him keep the locket—or he would have tattooed her face on yours; he wanted to make Golden Hair a woman.”

  Now, Libbie, no couple has ever been more devoted than we are, but it was horrible to contemplate you smeared across my face in whatever ashy dye that mad Indian had used on my arms. The idea was like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story—eerie, horrifying, a transformation most foul—though of course you are wonderful with your own face on your own body.

  “You did right,” I finally said to Scalp-Not-My-Woman. “Still, I will miss it—the locket, that is—and my wife’s picture.”

  “It’s closer to you now than it’s ever been,” she said, and there was no doubting that.

  We rode through the night, pressing our horses as hard as we reasonably could. Summers in Montana are hot, naturally, though the nights are cool; and as it can snow in the mountains as late as June, finding streams to keep the horses watered was no great trouble. We stopped around noon in a pleasant grove of trees to rest the horses and ourselves. I told Scalp-Not-My-Woman to sleep while I kept watch, but she insisted on keeping watch with me.

  “You cannot know, General Custer, how long, how desperately long, I have waited for this moment. I’m not going to let anything go wrong now.”

  I appreciated the sentiment but had to say, “You do realize, my good woman, that I am a trained officer of the United States Army and can spot enemy cavalry as well as any man alive.”

  “Then look there,” she said.

  Sure enough, there was a war party on the horizon, perhaps as many as a dozen braves. We had no weapons to speak of—they had allowed me a small knife—and the Indians had my word not to kill them. As good as our horses were, they were near spent. The Indian ponies, though, couldn’t be much rested either. I scanned the ground west. There was a ravine just beneath us that would keep us screened from the Indians, at least until they ran into it themselves, or unless they
had spotted us already. I took our horses and guided them down.

  “All right,” I said, patting my horse’s mane, “don’t die on me, old boy, but let’s go as fast as you can.”

  We shot through that ravine like a storm shower down a drainpipe, and we kept riding until our horses were so soaked in sweat that patting their sides was like slapping a sodden sponge. We rode out the opposite side of the ravine and kept riding until we found a hillock topped by a cluster of trees and lined by a trickling stream—a perfect position to rest our horses and spot the enemy, if he was still after us. Scalp-Not-My-Woman and I watched for pursuit, resting the horses for a good two hours. Then I turned to her and said, “I can’t bring myself to call you Rachel yet, but I’m willing to call you Scout—you’ve earned it.”

  She batted her eyelashes, as you women do, and said in reply, “All right, you can call me Scout—if I can call you Scalp-Not-My-Man.”

  It seemed a fair trade. She had saved my scalp once already. She might be in a position to do it again.

  We remounted and moved farther along, finally making camp at dusk in a copse of sweet-smelling pines and firs. There was a rocky outcrop that served as my watchtower over the land behind us. I felt pretty confident now. Much as they wanted to recover Scalp-Not-My-Woman and her slave, the warriors were likely on a tight leash. I’m sure in his dastardly Indian heart, Linewalker would have enjoyed torturing us; I’m sure he valued Scalp-Not-My-Woman as a possession; but Indians aren’t romantics, and he had a tribe to save—and maybe cavalry on his heels, or so I hoped—and his braves, I expected, had orders to return if they didn’t capture us quickly.

  The next morning we led our horses down a gentle slope onto a long flat plain. Smack in the middle of it was salvation—a town of fairish size, a church steeple prominent at the far end. Our cavalry horses knew immediately that it was their salvation too and picked up their pace. The townsfolk thought we made a sight—a sunburnt, buckskinned hero (or so they seemed to regard me, but I’m used to that, and I didn’t pay it any mind) and his beautiful half-breed squaw.