Free Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

until quite a spell afterward. As to Caroline, well, it’s useless to speculate about what she thought she knew or what she imagined, because they was always all mixed together.
    The main thing was that the chief had not made a deal to buy me and Caroline back at the wagons . What he done instead was make a long statement on the massacre, excusing the Cheyenne from any responsibility for it; but to be decent, because he liked white menstill at this time and he also figured to get blamed when the story reached the troops at Laramie, he brought them horses to pay for the men that were killed.
    So there we were, what with Caroline’s taste for romance and the gift for jumping to conclusions she inherited from our Pa, trailing Old Lodge Skins across the prairie under a terrible misapprehension. The chief thought we was following him to get more reparation and the speeches he made at them stops was to protest against the injustice of our hounding him like coyotes, who will sometimes follow you for miles.
    Caroline stared at him in love, and that poor Indian interpreted it as the look of ruthless extortion. In later years I grew greatly fond of Old Lodge Skins. He had more bad luck than any human being I have ever known, red or white, and you can’t beat that for making a man likable.
    As I say, none of us understood the situation, but me and Caroline was considerably better off than the chief, because we only looked to him for our upkeep in the foreseeable future, whereas he at last decided we was demons and only waiting for dark to steal the wits from his head; and while riding along he muttered prayers and incantations to bring us bad medicine, but so ran his luck that he never saw any of the animal brothers that assisted his magic—such as Rattlesnake or Prairie Dog—but rather only Jackrabbit, who had a grudge against him of long standing because he once had kept a prairie fire off his camp by exhorting it to burn the hares’ homes instead. Which it did, turning away from his lodges after coming so close the tepee-skins was scorched. Ever since that incident the rabbits all knew him, and when encountering him alone would stand up on them enormous hind legs and say: “We think bad thoughts for you.” They would also call him by his real name, which is as malicious as you can get, and go bounding off, showing white or black tail as the case may be, for both families had it in for that particular Indian.
    And I’ll say this: I never in my life saw more examples of that animal than when in the company of Old Lodge Skins. Let the toe of his moccasin protrude from the tepee, and up they’d leap for miles about, numerous as sparks when you throw a horseshoe in the forge.
    But the one defense a redskin has against the kind of harassment me and Caroline was, unbeknownst to us, dealing to our host is lossof interest. If an Indian can’t accomplish his purpose with reasonable haste, it bores hell out of him and he will forget it immediately. He is interested only in a going proposition. So with Old Lodge Skins, who after a bit tightened the scarlet blanket around him, which under a hot sun kept him cooler than had he exposed his naked back, and rode on as if he was the only living individual north of the River Platte.
    The third brave (counting as second the fellow sitting back a ways under the illusion he was dying) specialized in being always a half a mile off, to the left, right, or ahead. I guess he was looking both for enemies and something to eat. At any given time the Cheyenne was over-furnished with the first and had too little of the second.
    In such fashion we proceeded towards the Cheyenne camp, which I reckon to have been not more than ten mile, as the arrow flies, from the Platte in a direction north by northeast; but it took our little party three or four hours to get there, owing to the chief’s warped manner of navigating so as to discourage me and Caroline.
    The sun still held itself a hand’s width above the