Flashman and the Redskins. George Fraser MacDonald
Читать онлайн книгу.
a fit aide-de-camp to your General Terry, I daresay. I wish you a very good night, General Flashman.’
Which would have enabled him to stalk off with the honours, but I don’t abandon an argument when reasoned persuasion may prevail.
‘Now see here, you mealy little pimp!’ says I. ‘I’ve had just about a bellyful of your pious hypocritical maundering. Take a look at this!’ And while he gobbled again, and his sycophants uttered shocked cries, I dropped my head and pulled apart my top hair for his inspection. ‘See that bald patch? That, my industrious researcher, was done by a Brulé scalping knife, in the hand of a peaceful herdsman, to a man who’d done his damnedest to see that the Brulés and everyone else in the Dacotah nation got a fair shake.’ Which was a gross exaggeration, but never mind that. ‘So much for humanity and restraint …’
‘Good God!’ cries he, blenching. ‘Very well, sir – you may flaunt a wound. It does not prove your case. Rather, it explains your partiality—’
‘It proves that at least I know what I’m talking about! Which is more than you can say. As to Custer, he’s receipted and filed for the idiot he was, and for Chivington, he was a murderous maniac, and what’s worse, an amateur. But if you think they were a whit more guilty than your darling redskins, you’re an even bigger bloody fool than you look. What bleating breast-beaters like you can’t comprehend,’ I went on at the top of my voice, while the toadies pawed at me and yapped for the porters, ‘is that when selfish frightened men – in other words, any men, red or white, civilised or savage – come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of ’em want, the Lord alone knows why, then war breaks out, and the weaker goes under. Policies don’t matter a spent piss – it’s the men in fear and rage and uncertainty watching the woods and skyline, d’you see, you purblind bookworm, you! And you burble about enlightenment, by God—’
‘Catch hold of his other arm, Fred!’ says the porter, heaving away. ‘Come along now, general, if you please.’
‘—try to enlighten a Cumanche war-party, why don’t you? Suggest humanity and restraint to the Jicarillas who carved up Mrs White and her baby on Rock Creek! Have you ever seen a Del Norte rancho after the Mimbrenos have left their calling cards? No, not you, you plush-bottomed bastard, you! All right, steward, I’m going, damn you … but let me tell you,’ I concluded, and I daresay I may have shaken my finger at the academic squirt, who had got behind a chair and was looking ready to bolt, ‘that I’ve a damned sight more use for the Indian than you have – as much as I have for the rest of humanity, at all events – and I don’t make ’em an excuse for parading my own virtue while not caring a fig for them, as you do, so there! I know your sort! Broken treaties, you vain blot – why, Chico Velasquez wouldn’t have recognised a treaty if he’d fallen over it in the dark …’ But by that time I was out in Pall Mall, addressing the vault of heaven.
‘Who the hell ever said the Washington government was Christian, anyway?’ I demanded, but the porter said he really couldn’t say, and did I want a cab?
You may wonder that I got in such a taking over one pompous windbag spouting claptrap; usually I just sit and sneer when the know-alls start prating on behalf of the poor oppressed heathen, sticking a barb in ’em as opportunity serves – why, I’ve absolutely heard ’em lauding the sepoy mutineers as honest patriots, and I haven’t even bothered to break wind by way of dissent. I know the heathen, and their oppressors, pretty well, you see, and the folly of sitting smug in judgement years after, stuffed with piety and ignorance and book-learned bias. Humanity is beastly and stupid, aye, and helpless, and there’s an end to it. And that’s as true for Crazy Horse as it was for Custer – and they’re both long gone, thank God. But I draw the line at the likes of my anthropological half-truther; oh, there’s a deal in what he says, right enough – but it’s only one side of the tale, and when I hear it puffed out with all that righteous certainty, as though every white man was a villain and every redskin a saint, and the fools swallow it and feel suitably guilty … well, it can get my goat, especially if I’ve got a drink in me and my kidneys are creaking. So I’m slung out of the Travellers’ for ungentlemanly conduct. Much I care; I wasn’t a member, anyway.
A waste of good passion, of course. The thing is, I suppose, that while I spent most of my time in the West skulking and running and praying to God I’d come out with a whole skin, I have a strange sentiment for the place, even now. That may surprise you, if you know my history – old Flashy, the decorated hero and cowardly venal scoundrel who never had a decent feeling in all his scandalous, lecherous life. Aye, but there’s a reason, as you shall see.
Besides, when you’ve seen the West almost from the beginning, as I did – trader, wagon-captain, bounty-hunter, irregular soldier, whoremaster, gambler, scout, Indian fighter (well, being armed in the presence of the enemy qualifies you, even if you don’t tarry long), and reluctant deputy marshal to J. B. Hickok, Esq., no less – you’re bound to retain an interest, even in your eighty-ninth year.2 And it takes just a little thing – a drift of woodsmoke, a certain sunset, the taste of maple syrup on a pancake, or a few words of Apache spoken unexpected – and I can see the wagons creaking down to the Arkansas crossing, and the piano stuck fast on a mudbank, with everyone laughing while Susie played ‘Banjo on my knee’ … Old Glory fluttering above the gate at Bent’s … the hideous zeep of Navajo war-arrows through canvas … the great bison herds in the distance spreading like oil on the yellow plain … the crash and stamp of fandango with the poblanas’ heels clicking and their silk skirts whirling above their knees … the bearded faces of Gallantin’s riders in the fire glow … the air like nectar when we rode in the spring from the high glory of Eagle Nest, up under the towering white peaks to Fort St Vrain and Laramie … the incredible stink of those dark dripping forms in the Apache sweatbath at Santa Rita … the great scarred Cheyenne braves with their slanting feathers, riding stately, like kings to council … the round firm flesh beneath my hands in the Gila forest, the sweet sullen lips whispering … ‘Make my bells ring again …’ oh, yes indeed, ma’am … and the nightmare – the screams and shots and war-whoops as Gall’s Hunkpapa horde came surging through the dust, and George Custer squatting on his heels, his cropped head in his hands as he coughed out his life, and the red-and-yellow devil’s face screaming at me from beneath the buffalo-scalp helmet as the hatchet drove down at my brow …
‘Well, boys, they killed me,’ as Wild Bill used to say – only it wasn’t permanent, and today I sit at home in Berkeley Square staring out at the trees beyond the railings in the rain, damning the cramp in my penhand and remembering where it all began, on a street in New Orleans in 1849, with your humble obedient trotting anxiously at the heels of John Charity Spring, MA, Oriel man, slaver, and homicidal lunatic, who was stamping his way down to the quay in a fury, jacket buttoned tight and hat jammed down, alternately blaspheming and quoting Horace …
‘I should have dropped you overboard off Finisterre!’ snarls he. ‘It would have been the price of you, by God! Aye, well, I missed my chance – quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.’fn3 He wheeled on me suddenly, and those dreadful pale eyes would have frozen brandy. ‘But Homer won’t nod again, Mister Flashman, and you can lay to that. One false step out of you this trip, and you’ll wish the Amazons had got you!’
‘Captain,’ says I earnestly, ‘I’m as anxious to get out of this as you are – and you’ve said it yourself, how can I play you false?’
‘If I knew that I’d be as dirty a little Judas as you are.’ He considered me balefully. ‘The more I think of it, the more I like the notion of having those papers of Comber’s before we go a step farther.’
Now, those papers – which implicated both Spring himself and my miserly Scotch father-in-law up to their necks in the illegal slave trade – were the only card in my hand. Once Spring had them, he could drop me overboard indeed. Terrified as I was, I shook my head, and he showed his teeth in a sneering grin.
‘What are you scared of, you worm? I’ve said I’ll carry you home, and I keep my word. By God,’ he growled, and the scar on his brow started to swell crimson, a sure sign that he was preparing to howl at the