Return of Little Big Man Read Free Page B

figured if I could get unharmed down to the new settlements in the Black Hills, I could rejoin white society in a inconspicuous fashion, for people was crowding into that part of Dakota Territory on another of them gold rushes that happened periodically in the West. I had myself participated in that earlier one at Cherry Creek, Colorado, and after a lot of panning, got less gold dust than paid for the equipment, but then made the real discovery: namely, that almost all the money made from gold strikes is by them that sell miners their supplies, liquor, and women, at inflated prices.
    I managed, traveling on foot and mostly by night, after about a month to get down to the mining town of Deadwood in Dakota Territory, undamaged except for being three-quarters starved because food is hard to come by in the dark without the eyes of a catamount, and I had to eat wild turnips and unripe plums and bull-berries still green and hard, along with a lot of bark and weeds. I had no weapon but a real poor knife I had begged off my recent red comrades who despite their big victory was poor as ever, a kind of standard Indian situation.
    I was still wearing the skin shirt, which I might of gotten away with, but not so with the breech-cloth and leggings. Nor did I have sufficient money for the buying of replacements, and the people of them days, in that part of the world, generally wore the same clothes for months at a time, even when sleeping the night, having no extras, so it wouldn’t be easy to swipe anything.
    Deadwood at this time was more or less one long ditch of, depending on the weather, mud or dust, lined on both sides by saloons. They had spared from the axe one or two tall pines like what the Indians used for lodgepoles—another reason the Black Hills was precious land, the plains being treeless—a few stores, a number of harlotries, and a bathhouse.
    I took the lay of the land in the wee hours of the morning, by which time the streets was deserted and even the soiled doves had turned down the lamps in their rooms, else I might of tried to get past the madam (who was always a hard case) and talk one of the girls into extending me a little loan. I’ve had some experience of ladies of pleasure and while they won’t give sexual favors for free, because that’s a professional matter, they are otherwise at least as generous to needy men as are respectable women, maybe more so, having even more reason to look down on the male sex, encountering few customers who are either sober or have bathed in the previous year.
    Then I heard a groan coming from inside the bed of a wagon in the street out front of one of the saloons, not so much parked as abandoned, at an angle and without a horse. There was enough moon by which, if I stood on tiptoe and looked over the side, to see some fellow flopped there, either drunk or dying, in them days both being pretty routine in a gold town.
    I asks, “Partner, what ails you?”
    In response I got a stream of indecent abuse, so apparently he did not require medical treatment. “All right, then, you son of a bitch. I’ll fight you,” I says. I didn’t mean it. It was just a test and earned me some more abuse, but this time it was too slurred even to identify the words.
    I boosted myself up into the wagon and proceeded to strip off the drunk’s outer clothes, a wool shirt and a pair of pants that stank worse than anything I ever smelled until his filthy long underwear met the air.
    I drug these garments back up into the high woods back of the town, where I had hid, and soaked them the rest of the night in a cold mountain stream. Next morning they still stank though not as much, and somewhat less as the sun heated up and begun to steam them dry. If they shrunk some as well, all to the good, for I wasn’t so large as him I stole them from. I buried my Indian attire and went down into town again, now dressed at least as good as most of the other people on the main or in fact the only drag in