“When we charged down beside the ravine, there were dead women and children scattered in it where the wagon-guns-that-shoot-twice [Hotchkiss guns] caught them running away. Up on the hillside above the ravine, there were some women and children huddled together in a gully, and they screamed to us as we passed.
“It was not much of a fight. There were too many soldiers and we were few, and the wagon-guns shot at those coming over the hill behind us.
“We circled back up along the hillside to where a few women and children were still living.”
The old man paused and sat for a while with closed eyes. When he looked at me again his face was aglow with a pervasive smile. “That is where I found the road, Grandson,” he said. His voice was low and gentle, with a quaver of age in it. “That is where I found the road.
“I did not know her at first. The last time I saw her she was a girl yet; but that was when I went to Grandmother’s Land after the Rubbing Out of Long Hair. She was older and heavier, and she was holding a child under her blanket. I did not know her until she looked up at me, crying hard, and said, ‘O Shonka ’kan! Shonka ’kan! They have killed him! They have killed him!’ Then I knew Tashina’s eyes with the tears in them.”
The light went out of the old man’s face, and again he sat silent.
“It was not very far from there across the hills to the little gray log house on White Horse Creek,” he continued at length. “I put her on my horse and led him, walking, and all the while she held the child close under her blanket, crying hard. It was a little boy and he was dead.
“That night the snow came and a great wind blew, and we were alone in the little gray house. When the storm died, and it was very cold, some people came and we heard that her man was dead in the valley where the butchering began.
“Looks Twice and my mother came back with my grandfather and grandmother. We lived together there until the young grass came. And then one day when she did not cry any more, and we were talking about the good days, I said, ‘I want to be your horse again. Do I have to go and eat grass?’”
The old man chuckled over the memory for a while, and then he said, the warm glow spreading from his smile: “That is when we made this little gray house here where my daughter lives, and now she is getting old too.