“I was sick of fighting—I had had enough. I wanted to dance. We heard more long swords were coming with wheel guns (artillery, Gatlings). We moved camp north. They followed many days till we crossed the line. I stayed over there till Sitting Bull came back, and I came back with him. That’s all there is to tell. I never told it to white men before.” When he had finished, I said to him: “Rain, if you didn’t kill Long Yellow Hair, who did?” “I don’t know. No one knows. It was like running in the dark.” “Well,” asked Mac, “why was it Long Yellow Hair wasn’t scalped, when every one else was? Did you consider him too brave to be scalped?” “No, no one is too brave to be scalped; that wouldn’t make any difference. The squaws wondered afterward why they couldn’t find him. He must have laid under some other dead bodies. I didn’t know, till I heard it long afterward from the whites, that he wasn’t scalped.” “How many Indians were killed in the fight?” “I don’t remember, but about ten and four or ten and six.” “How about Curley, the Crow scout, who claims to have escaped?” asked Mac. “Ugh! I know Curley. He is a liar. He never was in the fight. His pony stumbled and broke something. He stayed behind to fix it. When he heard the firing, he ran off like a whipped dog. One long sword escaped, though; his pony ran off with him and went past our lodges. They told me about it at Chicago. I saw the man there, and I remembered hearing the squaws tell about it after the fight.” Rain-in-the-Face (Itiomagaju) is about sixty years of age now, and is the only chief that survives to tell the tale of the Custer fight. Gall and Sitting Bull have both gone to hunt the white buffalo long since. Rain can write his name in English. I taught him to do it at the World’s Fair in order to sell Longfellow’s poem, entitled “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face.” He doesn’t know the significance of it after he writes it. His knowledge of English is confined to about thirty words, but he can’t say them so any one can understand him, though he can understand almost anything that is said in English. Like all other Indians, his gratitude is for favors to come and not for favors already shown. He is utterly heartless and unprincipled, physically brave but morally a coward. His redeeming feature lies in the fact that you can depend upon any promise he makes, but it takes a world of patience to get him to promise anything. Even at the age of sixty he is still a Hercules. In form and face he is the most pronounced type of the ideal Fenimore Cooper, dime novel Indian in America. ----- Footnote 93: