their own likewise as with the whites, and Pile of Bones blew out the back of White Contrary’s head with a cap-and-ball pistol and his brains run out like water from a punctured canteen; he swayed for a long time before he dropped, retaining the jug that had cost him life itself, and Pile of Bones had to hack it from the hands of a corpse.
Walsh, who being Irish had hit the spirits in the wagon before he went to serve the Cheyenne, pulled a knife from his boot, but it got turned in the rush upon him and pierced his own belly; he was dying with terrible sounds. Otherwise, our fellows went down without resistance. Farthest out, I could recognize Jacob Worthing by his boot-bottoms, with the new soles put on at Laramie. John Clairmont, an Illinoisan, lay with his head pointed towards the wagons; I knew him by his baldness. And from the center of the tumult already over, sprouted a little thicket of arrows from among the matted grass. These turned out later to be fixed in my Pa, although at the time I didn’t know that but saw the feathered ends as a type of prairie bush.
For a while after the whites were disposed of, the Cheyenne that were left kept sucking at the jugs and paid no mind to the women and children. Which explains how Worthing’s wife and kid were able to get away: she picked up her boy and started running, with the wagons as cover between them and the Indians, towards the Laramie Mountains, snow-capped so far away though near-seeming the way eminences are on the prairie. You could see the Mrs. andchild for onto a mile, intermittently between their sinking into swells and then coming into sight again on the upward slope; finally they disappeared over a bluff and I have never heard of them from that day to this. The rest of us just stood there dumbstruck, not even crying.
But little Troy at this point up and made a desperate move. He run out to his daddy’s body, took a butcher knife off a scabbard in its belt, and stuck the side of a tall Cheyenne who was singing a drunken dirge in between pulls of a jug. An Indian admires that kind of ginger in a kid, and if this particular specimen had not been liquored up he might have give him a present and a strong name, but he was in the demon’s grip, and raised the lance on which he had been leaning and drove the boy off the ground on its point, which come out the back of his blue shirt directly, accompanied by a great blossom of scarlet. The Cheyenne kicked him free, and he struck the prairie with the sound of a wet rag being slapped onto a bar-top.
The boy would run from a lad his own age but took on a six-foot savage. As to yours truly, I believe at that time the other children looked on me as a bully though I was underweight and no bigger than a sparrow, for I was the youngest in my family and knocked about a good deal by my brothers and sisters, for which treatment I would pay back them to whom I was not kin. But seeing white men get punishment of this fashion from Indians, I have to admit I let the water drain into my pants.
About a dozen Cheyenne were still conscious when the whiskey was all gone, though some lay flat as the dead and wounded and put a glazed stare upon the sky. Others sat upon their skinny haunches, looking glassily into the crotch, and some whined like injured hounds. Old Lodge Skins was squatting there with his seamed face turned towards Caroline. After all that turmoil, in which, having his own jug, he had not participated except perhaps to set it off, he was yet trying to figure out what her game was, and on my sister’s part she was studying him, I think right through the worst of the carnage. Since a year or so back, she had been a peculiar type of person, somewhat forward with the male sex but on the order of another man rather than a harlot.
Hump busted the last jug with his hatchet and run each fragment over his tongue. His nose was dripping fresh blood from where that nostril had since come altogether off and got lost, and his
Walsh, who being Irish had hit the spirits in the wagon before he went to serve the Cheyenne, pulled a knife from his boot, but it got turned in the rush upon him and pierced his own belly; he was dying with terrible sounds. Otherwise, our fellows went down without resistance. Farthest out, I could recognize Jacob Worthing by his boot-bottoms, with the new soles put on at Laramie. John Clairmont, an Illinoisan, lay with his head pointed towards the wagons; I knew him by his baldness. And from the center of the tumult already over, sprouted a little thicket of arrows from among the matted grass. These turned out later to be fixed in my Pa, although at the time I didn’t know that but saw the feathered ends as a type of prairie bush.
For a while after the whites were disposed of, the Cheyenne that were left kept sucking at the jugs and paid no mind to the women and children. Which explains how Worthing’s wife and kid were able to get away: she picked up her boy and started running, with the wagons as cover between them and the Indians, towards the Laramie Mountains, snow-capped so far away though near-seeming the way eminences are on the prairie. You could see the Mrs. andchild for onto a mile, intermittently between their sinking into swells and then coming into sight again on the upward slope; finally they disappeared over a bluff and I have never heard of them from that day to this. The rest of us just stood there dumbstruck, not even crying.
But little Troy at this point up and made a desperate move. He run out to his daddy’s body, took a butcher knife off a scabbard in its belt, and stuck the side of a tall Cheyenne who was singing a drunken dirge in between pulls of a jug. An Indian admires that kind of ginger in a kid, and if this particular specimen had not been liquored up he might have give him a present and a strong name, but he was in the demon’s grip, and raised the lance on which he had been leaning and drove the boy off the ground on its point, which come out the back of his blue shirt directly, accompanied by a great blossom of scarlet. The Cheyenne kicked him free, and he struck the prairie with the sound of a wet rag being slapped onto a bar-top.
The boy would run from a lad his own age but took on a six-foot savage. As to yours truly, I believe at that time the other children looked on me as a bully though I was underweight and no bigger than a sparrow, for I was the youngest in my family and knocked about a good deal by my brothers and sisters, for which treatment I would pay back them to whom I was not kin. But seeing white men get punishment of this fashion from Indians, I have to admit I let the water drain into my pants.
About a dozen Cheyenne were still conscious when the whiskey was all gone, though some lay flat as the dead and wounded and put a glazed stare upon the sky. Others sat upon their skinny haunches, looking glassily into the crotch, and some whined like injured hounds. Old Lodge Skins was squatting there with his seamed face turned towards Caroline. After all that turmoil, in which, having his own jug, he had not participated except perhaps to set it off, he was yet trying to figure out what her game was, and on my sister’s part she was studying him, I think right through the worst of the carnage. Since a year or so back, she had been a peculiar type of person, somewhat forward with the male sex but on the order of another man rather than a harlot.
Hump busted the last jug with his hatchet and run each fragment over his tongue. His nose was dripping fresh blood from where that nostril had since come altogether off and got lost, and his
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