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position to fight off the attack. He told me to stand in front—but not because he was mad at me. I had the Evans carbine and could lay down a pretty withering fire.
    A little while later, a band of them Indians come charging up the hill, letting out that “Yip, yip” sort of war cry, but we started shooting and it looked like the noise alone driven them off. Somehow, during the confusion and all the shooting, they dragged the dead one away.
    We waited a long time for them to come back, but they didn’t. I thought when the sun come up full they’d over run us, but they was gone. There wasn’t nothing there but a few pieces of feather, and a pretty big blood spore from the one I shot.
    Theo got up on his wagon and started slapping the reins on the horses, and everybody followed him. He didn’t look at me. I rode Cricket up next to him like he asked me the night before, but he said nothing to me and I wasn’t gonna say I was sorry again nor nothing.
    After a while Theo looked down at me sternly. “I know folks out east think what happened today was just a commonplace,” he said. “We run into a spot of trouble and handled it. A few of us, situated well on high ground, drove off some marauders and killed one of them. But the truth is, we went into Indian country and murdered a brave. That’s what we done. There ain’t no other way to look at it.”
    “It’s what I done,” I said.
    He didn’t bother to notice I’d spoken at all.

Chapter 2
    After I killed my first Indian, Theo bade me ride in front of the lead wagon with Big Tree every day, so I guess you could say I become a part of the wagon train because I killed a man and proved I could be useful.
    Theo thought it best to track north toward the Platte River and Wyoming Territory. We stopped at Fort Riley on the Smoky Hill River in Kansas, and he decided we’d wait for a few more wagons to join us. “I want to be a larger party,” he said. “We’re going up Nebraska way first, then to Wyoming. Lots of warriors between here and there.”
    “I didn’t come out here to fight Indians,” I said.
    “You want to go to California or Oregon, you got to fight Indians at some point along the way. You already killed one. I hate to think what you might do with that gun of yours if you was looking for trouble.”
    We camped outside the fort, but we got to go in and buy things at the store any time we wanted. Those of us who was white anyway. Big Tree couldn’t go in there, but he had his own thing going. He never stayed in a wagon. One of the packhorses carried his lodgepoles and the skin he used to build a Indian teepee just east of where we was camped. The whole time we was there, I hardly ever seen him. I seen some of the soldiers, though. Sometimes a few of them come out and set with us around the campfires. They talked about the war and fighting Indians. “Indians ain’t like Rebs,” one of them said.
    “Or Yanks,” said another. From what I could see, most of them was too young or too old to be talking about the war. A lot of them drunk too much and staggered back toward the fort like weak-kneed fawns. To a man they hated Indians.
    But they was all good drinkers and talkers.
    One night I was sitting by the fire with Preston and Joe Crane, sipping some more of my whiskey. Preston chewed his tobacco and spit it into the fire and Joe Crane puffed on a short stump of a cigar. There was a young fellow with us named Treat. He come from Chicago on another train that had lately arrived. A big bearded trapper named Roman Turley strode out to our campfire and announced he was raising a militia to go fight Indians in Dakota Territory. The idea of being in a militia excited Treat. He said he’d missed the whole damn war because he was too young, and now that he was seventeen he thought he might be ready for a military career. He was traveling with his sister and her husband, and he said nobody had a hold on him. “I can go anyplace I want,” he said.