What would you do with their wives, he asked himself? Buy them new hats or shoot them, he said. It’s all part of the same process.
He looked at himself in the mirror, set in the half closed door. It showed him at a slight angle. It’s a deflection shot, he said to himself, and they didn’t lead me enough. Boy, he said, you certainly are a beat-up, old looking bastard.
Now you have to shave and look at that face while you do it. Then you must get a hair-cut. That’s easy in this town. You’re a Colonel of Infantry, boy. You can’t go around looking like Joan of Arc or General (Brevetted) George Armstrong Custer. That beautiful horse-cavalryman. I guess it is fun to be that way and have a loving wife and use sawdust for brains. But it must have seemed like the wrong career to him when they finished up on that hill above the Little Big Horn, with the ponies making the circle around them in all the dust, and the sage brush crushed by the hooves of the horses of the other people, and nothing left to him for the rest of his life but that old lovely black powder smell and his own people shooting each other, and themselves, because they were afraid of what the squaws would do to them.
The body was unspeakably mutilated, they used to put in this same paper. And on that hill to know you’d made one real mistake, finally, and for good, and complete with true handles. Poor horse-cavalryman, he thought. The end of all his dreams. That’s one good thing about being an Infantryman. You never have any dreams except bad dreams.
