The sergeant in charge of the detail blinked and glowered at the Indians. “You goddam Injuns,” he yelled, “had better turn in your guns goddam quick or you’re going to be all goddam dead!”
Chance’s heart sunk.
He was not close but he guessed the sergeant might be drunk, literally. It was not an easy thing to do, to walk into a camp of frightened, angry Indians, and ask them to give up their only means of defending themselves in the presence of armed, blood foes. The sergeant, Chance guessed, might well be drunk. How else would they have gotten a volunteer to walk into the Sioux camp and make that demand? That was the officer’s job, wasn’t it? No, Chance decided, officers, at least those with sufficient seniority, were for looking through binoculars. Commanding from interior lines, it was called. But, drunk or not, the sergeant was foul and incoherent. The Indians were staring back at him as he shouted at them, and stopped to wipe his mouth on his sleeve, and then shouted some more, making his demand, insulting them.
Several of the Indians, of course, could understand English. And all of them, whether or not they could have been said in any meaningful sense to understand the language or not, were clear that this white man was cursing them, abusing them, and that he was doing this before their wives and children.
Old Bear was listening, apparently impassively, but Chance sensed that the old man was enraged.
The blue square of surrounding soldiers, nearly five hundred strong, shifted uneasily.
Old Bear shut his eyes for a moment and seemed almost to waver with fury, but then he opened his eyes, and lifted his hands to his people. His voice almost broke. “Give up your rifles,” he called out, as loudly, as calmly, as he could.
“You there!” bawled the sergeant, jabbing his short finger at Drum, who was standing conspicuously a bit in front of the other Indians. “You gotta gun under that blanket! Give it to me!”
“Come and take it,” said Drum.
“Do not take the gun,” said Old Bear.
The sergeant hesitated an instant but then, sensible of the eyes of his men behind him, the troops beyond, the Indians gathered about, and the young man challenging him, stalked over to Drum and with both hands he tore open Drum’s blanket, to find the muzzle of Drum’s rifle, at a high angle, suddenly under his chin. Drum’s hand, which was low, was on the trigger.
The sergeant’s face went white and if he had been drunk before it was now a sober man that was looking down the barrel of Drum’s weapon.
“Take the gun,” said Drum.
“Do not take the gun,” said Old Bear.
Desperately the sergeant made a sudden move to knock the rifle aside, and Drum simultaneously pulled the trigger and the sergeant stood there for a second oddly leaning backward in a noise his hat blown off with the top of his skull, and then fell backward, sprawling in the dust, and the four lines of the blue square almost at the same time opened fire.
Warriors threw off their blankets blazing away with hidden rifles. Some of them used bows and arrows. Several charged the soldiers across the open ground with knives and hatchets. The quiet, cold December morning suddenly shattered in the staccato cough of gunfire and the shrieks of human beings who had not expected to die.
Chance threw himself to the ground about the same time the cross fire from the lines of soldiers cut through the camp. He discovered, not remembering drawing it, his weapon in his hand. He saw soldiers to his left falling, struck by the bullets of their comrades across the camp. Fighting bodies broiled about him. A Minneconjou, about forty years old, fell near him, a groping hand caught in his own intestines, loosed by the slash of a bayonet. Chance saw Big Foot, blankets wet with blood, tottering and stumbling and then falling, and saw one of his wives, caught in the same burst of fire, fall across his body. He heard the frightened scream of a child pierce the shouts and cries for a second. One Hunkpapa brave was mounted and, hanging low on the neck of his pony, galloped through the fighting. He made it past the camp when the four Hotchkiss machine guns opened up, leaving both the horse and its rider rolling tattered in the grass.
Thank God, thought Chance, they don’t dare fire the guns into the camp. Everywhere soldiers and Indians struggled, rolling in the dirt, slashing at each other, grappling, firing when they could, cursing. There were probably twice as many soldiers as Indians altogether, and the soldiers outnumbered the warriors, Chance guessed, about four to one.
Chance saw a frenzied Minneconjou drawing a bead on him, and would never forget the wild eye glinting down the carbine sight, and Chance raised his arm to fire at the man, but before he could fire saw the man move as though knocked to one side by an invisible assailant, struck in the side of the head by a soldier’s bullet.
The soldier grinned at Chance, shoving another bullet into his gun. He held up three fingers. You sonofabitch, thought Chance, of the man who had saved his life. Then the man was looking for another target.
A woman’s shriek rang out near him.
A dozen feet to his right, soldiers were holding squaws and children while a private, one after the other, was thrusting his bayonet through their bodies.
Chance leaped to his feet and raced through the fierce tangle of fighting bodies, just as the child, the small boy, who had smiled at the brass button of a soldier a few minutes before, was kicked from the wet end of the bayonet.
Chance seized the soldier by the collar and spun him around smashing the butt of his Colt in the man’s teeth, and the fellow, stunned, stood there and whimpered, and Chance tore away his rifle and threw it down, and then with his weapon covered the other soldiers.
“Turn them loose,” said Chance, “all of them, or I’ll kill you.”
The soldiers, puzzled, not understanding, hesitated.
Suddenly he noticed that one of the men held Winona. He swung his gun on the man. “All right,” he said, “you die first.”
The man pushed Winona away from him and she scurried away.
One by one, under the barrel of Chance’s gun, the soldiers released their prizes.
The squaws and children ran, some of them falling only a moment later in the fighting.
“What in hell do you think you’re doing?” asked one of the soldiers.
“Who are you?” asked another.
“You’re crazy, Mister,” said another.
“You’re a white man, ain’t you,” said another.
The man whom Chance had struck in the teeth was shaking his head and feeling his mouth with his right hand, running his finger over the broken teeth in his face. “Why’d you hit me?” he asked, and Chance, to his horror, knew that the man did not know.
Chance turned away, looking for Running Horse.
Instead he caught sight of Drum, his hatchet gone, himself red with blood and exultant, leaping on the back of a trooper, plunging his knife into the man’s face and neck. Chance shook his head to get rid of the sight. Then he saw, to one side, Running Horse, who fired his weapon through the smoke and the moving bodies, bringing down a trooper who was aiming after a running squaw. As some of the Indians, mostly women and children, made it to the open prairie, the Hotchkiss guns opened up again, leaving them like flowers scattered on the grass.
The battle had broken up into a stew of small, fierce knots. It was only a matter of time now. Again the machine guns opened up, this time on the near end of the camp, the bullets falling like metal rain into a group of women and children who huddled there. In another part of the camp soldiers had begun to set fire to the lodges. The heavy tide of numbers and equipment had never left the ultimate issue of the battle in doubt, and the inevitabilities of the situation were even now moving swiftly to their relentless conclusion. Where they could the Sioux fled, some warriors standing their ground to cover the retreat of their comrades, then even these began to turn and run, if they had not already fallen. As if angered that anything might escape the closely woven net of death the Hotchkiss guns kept up alternating bursts of fire, pouring shells here and there about the camp and near it where Indians attempted to escape. At the rear of the camp Chance saw several warriors, led by Drum and Old Bear, fighting side by side, trying to shield the flight of women and children, some of the children in arms, from the camp. Most of these it seemed, once they cleared the camp, fell under the sharp, irregular rhythms of the guns on the ridge.
Some of the women would not leave and desperately, under fire, they brought screaming, pawing horses to their warriors, some of the women pulling as many as three or four of the frightened, snorting animals. Chance saw a horse hit in the flank with a bullet sink to its rear legs, as if comically sitting, then regain its legs and break away from the squaw with a shake of his head and gallop squeaking out into the prairie, starting to turn in circles. Together in the confusion the braves and squaws mounted as best they could, a wild scattering of riders, and thundered from the camp, some sprawling from the horses in the fire of the guns on the ridge, others somehow making it away.
Chance saw Drum and Old Bear among the escaping Indians. Chance was glad.
He looked wildly about for Running Horse or Winona.
Most of the Indians left now were wounded or fighting savagely, individuals not free to run, locked in place by the constraints of immediate combat.
Chance ran to Running Horse, who suddenly swung his rifle on him to fire. Chance knocked the weapon aside. “Get out of here!” yelled Chance.
Running Horse nodded.
He began to back away after Chance, spitting cartridges from his mouth one by one into his hand, shoving them in his rifle and firing.
They moved slowly back through men fighting, each man intent on his own world, containing a single antagonist, red or white, a world that would not be divided between them, a tiny, sweating, horrifying world in which one of them must die and one live.
They fought with hands, knives, hatchets, gouging, kicking, slashing.
But of all these incidents Chance remembered one more clearly than any other.
Running Horse actually backed into a trooper and when the man turned to fire, Chance had held his arm and said very quietly, “No, don’t shoot,” and the man had said, “All right,” and hadn’t. Chance wondered afterwards about the strangeness of that. The man had obeyed him, he supposed, simply because he was white, and had sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Perhaps the man had supposed Running Horse was a scout or somehow attached to the command. But there hadn’t been any Indians attached to the command. At any rate he hadn’t shot, but had said “All right,” and had turned elsewhere. Running Horse, too, hadn’t attempted to fight with the man, when he saw Chance speak to him. Perhaps he assumed Chance knew him; perhaps he simply saw that the man was not going to fight him.