Return of Little Big Man (20 page)

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.