“’A brave man fears nothing. If you are a coward, don’t go. I’ll ask some other young man who isn’t afraid, if he hasn’t danced in the Sun Dance.’ (This was a torture dance in which Rain-in-the-Face subsequently underwent the most horrible self-torture ever inflicted.[93])
“The other girls laughed, but the young men who heard it didn’t. They feared me. I would have killed them for laughing. I went to my lodge and painted sapa (black, the color used when they go on the war-path), took my gun, my bow, my pony. Sitting Bull had forbidden any one to leave camp without his permission. I skipped off under cover of darkness and went up to Lincoln (forty-five miles north, opposite the present site of Bismarck, North Dakota). I hung around for two days, watching for a chance to shoot a long sword. I had plenty of chances to kill a Ree squaw, plenty to kill a wood-chopper, but I wanted to carry back the brass buttons of a long sword to the girl who laughed at me. I did so, and she sewed them on her shawl. One morning I saw the sutler (store keeper) and a horse medicine man (U. S. Veterinary Surgeon Hontzinger) go out to a spring; Long Yellow Hair (General Custer) and his men were riding back about 100 yards. I rushed up and shot the sutler and brained the horse medicine man with my war club; then I shot them full of arrows and cut off some buttons. Long Yellow Hair heard the shot and his troop charged back. I didn’t have time to scalp the men I got. I jumped on my pony and yelled at them to catch me. They chased me to the Cannon Ball (a small river twenty-five miles south). Charlie Reynolds (a scout) knew me and told Long Yellow Hair who did this brave deed.
“Next winter I went to the agency store at Standing Rock. I drew no rations—I hadn’t signed the paper. (All the Indians who signed a peace treaty and consented to live on the reservation, under military orders, were furnished with rations by the government twice a month. The hostiles had to live by hunting.) Istokscha (One Arm, the Hon. H. S. Parkin) was running the store then. I wasn’t afraid of any of them. Little Hair (Capt. Tom Custer) had thirty long swords there. He slipped up behind me like a squaw, when my back was turned. They all piled on me at once; they threw me in a sick wagon (ambulance) and held me down till they got me to the guard-room at Lincoln.