Dead Man's Walk

1.

MATILDA JANE ROBERTS WAS naked as the air. Known throughout south Texas as the Great Western, she came walking up from the muddy Rio Grande holding a big snapping turtle by the tail. Matilda was almost as large as the skinny little Mexican mustang Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were trying to saddle-break. Call had the mare by the ears, waiting for Gus to pitch the saddle on her narrow back, but the pitch was slow in coming. When Call glanced toward the river and saw the Great Western in all her plump nakedness, he knew why: young Gus McCrae was by nature distractable; the sight of a naked, two-hundred-pound whore carrying a full-grown snapping turtle had captured his complete attention, and that of the rest of the Ranger troop as well.

“Look at that, Woodrow,” Gus said. “Matty’s carrying that old turtle as if it was a basket of peaches.”

“I can’t look,” Call said. “I’ll lose my grip and get kicked—and I’ve done been kicked.” The mare, small though she was, had already displayed a willingness to kick and bite. Call knew that if he loosened his grip on her ears even slightly, he could count on getting kicked, or bitten, or both.

Long Bill Coleman, lounging against his saddle only a few yards from where the two young Rangers were struggling with the little mustang, watched Matilda approach, with a certain trepidation. Although it was only an hour past breakfast, he was already drunk. It seemed to Long Bill, in his tipsy state, that the Great Western was walking directly toward him with her angry catch. It might be that she meant to use the turtle as some kind of weapon—or so Long Bill surmised. Matilda Roberts despised debt, and carried grudges freely and at length. Bill knew himself to be considerably in arrears, the result of a persistent lust coupled with a vexing string of losses at cards. At the moment, he didn’t have a red cent and knew that he was unlikely to have one for days, or even weeks to come. If Matilda, who was whimsical, chose to call his debt, his only recourse might be to run; but Long Bill was in no shape to run, and in any case, there was no place to run to that offered the least prospect of refuge. The Rangers were camped on the Rio Grande, west of the alkaline Pecos. They were almost three hundred miles from the nearest civilized habitation, and the country between them and a town was not inviting.

“When’s the next payday, Major?” Long Bill inquired, glancing at his leader, Major Randall Chevallie.

“That woman acts like she might set that turtle on me,” he added, hoping that Major Chevallie would want to issue an order or something. Bill knew that there were military men who refused to allow whores within a hundred feet of their camp—even whores not armed with snapping turtles.

Major Chevallie had only spent three weeks at West Point—he left because he found the classes boring and the discipline vexing. He nonetheless awarded himself the rank of major after a violent scrape in Baltimore convinced him that civilian life hemmed a man in with such a passel of legalities that it was no longer worth pursuing. Randall Chevallie hid on a ship, and the ship took him to Galveston; upon disembarking at that moist, sandy port, he declared himself a major and had been a major ever since.

Now, except for the two young Rangers who were attempting to saddle the Mexican mare, his whole troop was drunk, the result of an incautious foray into Mexican territory the day before. They had crossed the Rio Grande out of boredom, and promptly captured a donkey cart containing a few bushels of hard corn and two large jugs of mescal, a liquor of such potency that it immediately unmanned several of the Rangers. They had been without spirits for more than a month—they drank the mescal like water. In fact, it tasted a good deal better than any water they had tasted since crossing the Pecos.

The mescal wasn’t water, though; two men went blind for awhile, and several others were troubled by visions of torture and dismemberment. Such visions, at the time, were not hard to conjure up, even without mescal, thanks to the folly of the unfortunate Mexican whose donkey cart they had captured. Though the Rangers meant the man no harm—or at least not much harm—he fled at the sight of gringos and was not even out of earshot before he fell into the hands of Comanches or Apaches: it was impossible to tell from his screams which tribe was torturing him. All that was known was that only three warriors took part in the torturing. Bigfoot Wallace, the renowned scout, returned from a lengthy look around and reported seeing the tracks of three warriors, no more. The tracks were heading toward the river.

Many Rangers thought Bigfoot’s point somewhat picayune, since the Mexican could not have screamed louder if he had been being tortured by fifty men—the screams made sleep difficult, not to mention short. The Great Western didn’t earn a cent all night. Only young Gus McCrae, whose appetite for fornication admitted no checks, approached Matilda, but of course young McCrae was penniless, and Matilda in no mood to offer credit.

“You better turn that mare loose for awhile,” Gus advised. “Matty’s coming with that big turtle—I don’t know what she means to do with it.”

“Can’t turn loose,” Call said, but then he did release the mare, jumping sideways just in time to avoid her flailing front hooves. It was clear to him that Gus had no intention of trying to saddle the mare, not anytime soon. When there was a naked whore to watch, Gus was unlikely to want to do much of anything, except watch the whore.

“Major, what about payday?” Long Bill inquired again.

Major Chevallie cocked an eyebrow at Long Bill Coleman, a man noted for his thorough laziness.

“Why, Bill, the mail’s undependable, out here beyond the Pecos,” the Major said. “We haven’t seen a mail coach since we left San Antonio.”

“That whore with the dern turtle wants to be paid now,” one-eyed Johnny Carthage speculated.

“I’ve never seen a whore bold enough to snatch an old turtle right out of the Rio Grande River,” Bob Bascom said. In his opinion, it had been quite unmilitary for the Major to allow Matilda Roberts to accompany them on their expedition; though how he would have stopped her, short of gunplay, was not easy to say. Matilda had simply fallen in with them when they left the settlements. She rode a large gray horse named Tom, who lost flesh rapidly once they were beyond the fertile valleys. Matilda had no fear of Indians, or of anything else, not so far as Bob Bascom was aware. She helped herself liberally to the Rangers’ grub, and conducted business on a pallet she spread in the bushes, when there were bushes. Bob had to admit that having a whore along was a convenience, but he still considered it unmilitary, though he was not so incautious as to give voice to his opinion.

Major Randall Chevallie was of uncertain temper at best. Rumor had it that he had, on occasions, conducted summary executions, acting as his own firing squad. His pistol was often in his hand, and though his leadership was erratic, his aim wasn’t. He had twice brought down running antelope with his pistol—most of the Rangers couldn’t have hit a running antelope with a rifle, or even a Gatling gun.

“That whore didn’t snatch that turtle out of the river,” Long Bill commented. “I seen that turtle sleeping on a rock, when I went to wash the puke off myself. She just snuck up on it and picked it off that rock. Look at it snap at her. Now she’s got it mad!”

The snapper swung its neck this way and that, working its jaws; but Matilda Roberts was holding it at arm’s length, and its jaws merely snapped the air.

“What next?” Gus said, to Call.

“I don’t know what next,” Call said, a little irritated at his friend. Sooner or later they would have to have another try at saddling the mare—a chancy undertaking.

“Maybe she means to cook it,” Call added.

“I have heard of slaves eating turtle,” Gus said. “I believe they eat them in Mississippi.”

“Well, I wouldn’t eat one,” Call informed him. “I’d still like to get a saddle on this mare, if you ain’t too busy to help.”

The mare was snubbed to a low mesquite tree—she wound herself tighter and tighter, as she kicked and struggled.

“Let’s see what Matilda’s up to first,” Gus said. “We got all day to break horses.”

“All right, but you’ll have to take the ears, this time,” Call said. “I’ll do the saddling.”

Matilda swung her arm a time or two and heaved the big turtle in the general direction of a bunch of Rangers—the boys were cleaning their guns and musing on their headaches. They scattered like quail when they saw the turtle sailing through the air. It turned over twice and landed on its back, not three feet from the campfire.

Bigfoot Wallace squatted by the fire—he had just finished pouring himself a cup of coffee. It was chickory coffee, but at least it was black. Bigfoot paid the turtle no attention at all—Matty Roberts had always been somewhat eccentric, in his view. If she wanted to throw snapping turtles around, that was her business. He himself was occupied with more urgent concerns, one of them being the identity of the three warriors who had tortured the Mexican to death. A few hours after coming across their tracks he had dozed off and dreamed a disturbing dream about Indians. In his dream Buffalo Hump was riding a spotted horse, while Gomez walked beside him. Buffalo Hump was the meanest Comanche anyone had ever heard of, and Gomez the meanest Apache. The fact that a Comanche killer and an Apache killer were traveling together, in his dream, was highly unpleasant. Never before, that he could remember, had he had a dream in which something so unlikely happened. He almost felt he should report the dream to Major Chevallie, but the Major, at the moment, was distracted by Matilda Roberts and her turtle.

“Good morning, Miss Roberts, is that your new pet?” the Major inquired, when Matilda walked up.

“Nope, that’s breakfast—turtle beats bacon,” Matilda said. “Has anybody got a shirt I can borrow? I left mine out by the pallet.”

She had strolled down to the river naked because she felt like having a wash in the cold water. It wasn’t deep enough to swim in, but she gave herself a good splashing. The old snapper just happened to be lazing on a rock nearby, so she grabbed it. Half the Rangers were scared of Matilda anyway, some so scared they would scarcely look at her, naked or clothed. The Major wasn’t scared of her, nor was Bigfoot or young Gus; the rest of the men, in her view, were incompetents, the kind of men who were likely to run up debts and get killed before they could pay them. She sailed the snapper in their direction to let them know she expected honest behavior. Going naked didn’t hurt, either. She was big, and liked it; she could punch most men out, if she had to, and sometimes she had to; her dream was to get to California and own a fine bordello, which was why she fell in with the first Ranger troop going west. It was a scraggly little troop, composed mostly of drunks and shiftless ramblers, but she took it and was making the best of it. The alternative was to wait in Texas, get old, and never own a bordello in California.

At her request several Rangers immediately began to take off their shirts, but Bigfoot Wallace made no move to remove his, and his was the only shirt large enough to cover much of Matty Roberts.

“I guess you won’t be sashaying around naked much longer, Matty,” he observed, sipping his chickory.

“Why not? I ain’t stingy about offering my customers a look,” Matilda said, rejecting several of the proffered shirts.

Bigfoot nodded toward the north, where a dark tone on the horizon contrasted with the bright sunlight.

“One of our fine blue northers is about to whistle in,” he informed her. “You’ll have icicles hanging off your twat, in another hour, if you don’t cover it up.”

“I wouldn’t need to cover it up if anyone around here was prosperous enough to warm it up,” Matilda said, but she did note that the northern horizon had turned a dark blue. Several Rangers observed the same fact, and began to pull on long johns or other garments that might be of use against a norther. Bigfoot Wallace was known to have an excellent eye for weather. Even Matilda respected it—she strolled over to her pallet and pulled on a pair of blacksmith’s overalls that she had taken in payment for a brief engagement in Fredericksburg. She had a tattered capote, acquired some years earlier in Pennsylvania, and she put that on too. A blue norther could quickly suck the warmth out of the air, even on a nice sunny day.

“Well, we’ve conquered a turtle, I guess,” Major Chevallie said, standing up. “I suppose that Mexican died—I don’t hear much noise from across the river.”

“If he’s lucky, he died,” Bigfoot said. “It was just three Indians—Comanches, I’d figure. I doubt three Comanches would pause more than one night to cut up a Mexican.”

About that time Josh Corn and Ezekiel Moody came walking back to camp from the sandhill where they had been standing guard. Josh Corn was a little man, only about half the size of his tall friend. Both were surprised to see a sizable snapping turtle kicking its legs in the air, not much more than arm’s length from the coffeepot.

“Why’s everybody dressing up, is there going to be a parade?” Josh asked, noting that several Rangers were in the process of pulling on clothes.

“That Mexican didn’t have no way to kill himself,” Bob Bascom remarked. “He didn’t have no gun.”

“No, but he had a knife,” Bigfoot reminded him. “A knife’s adequate, if you know where to cut.”

“Where would you cut—I’ve wondered,” Gus asked, abruptly leaving Call to contemplate the Mexican mustang alone. He was a Ranger on the wild frontier now and needed to imbibe as much technical information as possible about methods of suicide, when in danger of capture by hostiles with a penchant for torture.

“No Comanche’s going to be quick enough to sew up your jugular vein, if you whack it through in two or three places,” Bigfoot said. Aware that several of the Rangers were inexpert in such matters, he stretched his long neck and put his finger on the spot where the whacking should be done.

“It’s right here,” he said. “You could even poke into it with a big mesquite thorn, or whack at it with a broken bottle, if you’re left without no knife.”

Long Bill Coleman felt a little queasy, partly because of the mescal and partly from the thought of having to stick a thorn in his neck in order to avoid Comanche torture.

“Me, I’ll shoot myself in the head if I’ve got time,” Long Bill said.

“Well, but that can go wrong,” Bigfoot informed him. Once set in an instructional direction, he didn’t like to turn until he had given a thorough lecture. Bigfoot considered himself to be practical to a fault—if a man had to kill himself in a hurry, it was best to know exactly how to proceed.

“Don’t go sticking no gun in your mouth, unless it’s a shotgun,” he advised, noting that Long Bill looked a little green. Probably the alkaline water didn’t agree with him.

“Why not? It’s hard to miss your head if you’ve got a gun in your mouth,” Ezekiel Moody commented.

“No, it ain’t,” Bigfoot said. “The bullet could glance off a bone and come out your ear. You’d still be healthy enough that they could torture you for a week. Shove the barrel of the gun up against an eyeball and pull—that’s sure. Your brains will get blown out the back of your head—then if some squaw comes along and chews off your balls and your pecker, you won’t know the difference.”

“My, this is a cheery conversation,” Major Chevallie said. “I wish Matilda would come back and remove this turtle.”

“I’d like to go back and have another look at them tracks,” Bigfoot said. “It was about dark when I seen them. Another look couldn’t hurt.”

“It could hurt if the Comanches that got that Mexican caught you,” Josh Corn remarked.

“Why, those boys are halfway to the Brazos by now,” Bigfoot said, just as Matilda returned to the campfire. She squatted down by the turtle and watched it wiggle, a happy expression on her broad face. She had a hatchet in one hand and a small bowie knife in the other.

“Them turtles don’t turn loose of you till it thunders, once they got aholt of you,” Ezekiel said. Matilda Roberts ignored this hackneyed opinion. She caught the turtle right by the head, held its jaws shut, and slashed at its neck with the little bowie knife. The whole company watched, even Call. Several of the men had traveled the Western frontier all their lives. They considered themselves to be experienced men, but none of them had ever seen a whore decapitate a snapping turtle before.

Blackie Slidell watched Matilda slash at the turtle’s neck with a glazed expression. The mescal had caused him to lose his vision entirely, for several hours—in fact, it was still somewhat wobbly. Blackie had an unusual birthmark—his right ear was coal black, thus his name. Although he couldn’t see very well, Blackie was not a little disturbed by Bigfoot’s chance remark about the chewing propensities of Comanche squaws. He had long heard of such things, of course, but had considered them to be unfounded rumor. Bigfoot Wallace, though, was the authority on Indian customs. His comment could not be ignored, even if everybody else was watching Matilda cut the head off her turtle.

“Hell, if we see Indians, let’s kill all the squaws,” Blackie said, indignantly. “They got no call to be behaving like that.”

“Oh, there’s worse than that happens,” Bigfoot remarked casually, noting that the turtle’s blood seemed to be green—if it had blood. A kind of green ooze dripped out of the wound Matilda had made. She herself was finding the turtle’s neck a difficult cut. She gave the turtle’s head two or three twists, hoping it would snap off like a chicken’s would have, but the turtle’s neck merely kinked, like a thick black rope.

“What’s worse than having your pecker chewed off?” Blackie inquired.

“Oh, having them pull out the end of your gut and tie it to a dog,” Bigfoot said, pouring himself more chickory. “Then they chase the dog around camp for awhile, until about fifty feet of your gut is strung out in front of you, for brats to eat.”

“To eat?” Long Bill asked.

“Why yes,” Bigfoot said. “Comanche brats eat gut like ours eat candy.”

“Whew, I’m glad I wasn’t especially hungry this morning,” Major Chevallie commented. “Talk like this would unsettle a delicate stomach.”

“Or they might run a stick up your fundament and set it on fire—that way your guts would done be cooked when they pull them out,” Bigfoot explained.

“What’s a fundament?” Call asked. He had had only one year of schooling, and had not encountered the word in his speller. He kept the speller with him in his saddlebag, and referred to it now and then when in doubt about a letter or a word.

Bob Bascom snorted, amused by the youngster’s ignorance.

“It’s a hole in your body and it ain’t your nose or your mouth or your goddamn ear,” Bob said. “I’d have that little mare broke by now, if it was me doing it.”

Call smarted at the rebuke—he knew they had been lax with the mare, who had now effectively snubbed herself to the little tree. She was trembling, but she couldn’t move far, so he quickly swung the saddle in place and held it there while she crow-hopped a time or two.

Matilda Roberts sweated over her task, but she didn’t give up. The first gusts of the norther scattered the ashes of the campfire. Major Chevallie had just squatted to refill his cup—his coffee soon had a goodly sprinkling of sand. When the turtle’s head finally came off, Matilda casually pitched it in the direction of Long Bill, who jumped up as if she’d thrown him a live rattler.

The turtle’s angry eyes were still open, and its jaws continued to snap with a sharp click.

“It ain’t even dead with its head off,” Long Bill said, annoyed.

Shadrach, the oldest Ranger, a tall, grizzled specimen with a cloudy past, walked over to the turtle’s head and squatted down to study it. Shadrach rarely spoke, but he was by far the most accurate rifle shot in the troop. He owned a fine Kentucky rifle, with a cherry-wood stock, and was contemptuous of the bulky carbines most of the troop had adopted.

Shadrach found a little mesquite stick and held it in front of the turtle’s head. The turtle’s beak immediately snapped onto the stick, but the stick didn’t break. Shadrach picked up the little stick with the turtle’s head attached to it and dropped it in the pocket of his old black coat.

Josh Corn was astonished.

“Why would you keep a thing like that?” he asked Shadrach, but the old man took no interest in the question.

“Why would he keep a smelly old turtle’s head?” Josh asked Bigfoot Wallace.

“Why would Gomez raid with Buffalo Hump?” Bigfoot asked. “That’s a better question.”

Matilda, by this time, had hacked through the turtle shell with her hatchet and was cutting the turtle meat into strips. Watching her slice the green meat caused Long Bill Coleman to get the queasy feeling again. Young Call, though nicked by a rear hoof, had succeeded in cinching the saddle onto the Mexican mare.

Major Chevallie was sipping his ashy coffee. Already the new wind from the north had begun to cut. He hadn’t been paying much attention to the half-drunken campfire palaver, but between one sip of coffee and the next, Bigfoot’s question brought him out of his reverie.

“What did you say about Buffalo Hump?” he asked. “I wouldn’t suppose that scoundrel is anywhere around.”

“Well, he might be,” Bigfoot said.

“But what was that you said, just now?” the Major asked. “It’s hard to concentrate, with Matilda cutting up this ugly turtle.”

“I had a dern dream,” Bigfoot admitted. “In my dream Gomez was raiding with Buffalo Hump.”

“Nonsense, Gomez is Apache,” the Major said.

Bigfoot didn’t answer. He knew that Gomez was Apache, and that Apache didn’t ride with Comanche—that was not the normal order of things. Still, he had dreamt what he dreamt. If Major Chevallie didn’t enjoy hearing about it, he could sip his coffee and keep quiet.

The whole troop fell silent for a moment. Just hearing the names of the two terrible warriors was enough to make the Rangers reflect on the uncertainties of their calling, which were considerable.

“I don’t like that part about the guts,” Long Bill said. “I aim to keep my own guts inside me, if nobody minds.”

Shadrach was saddling his horse—he felt free to leave the troop at will, and his absences were apt to last a day or two.

“Shad, are you leaving?” Bigfoot asked.

“We’re all leaving,” Shadrach said. “There’s Indians to the north. I smell ’em.”

“I thought I still gave the orders around here,” Major Chevallie said. “I don’t know why you would have such a dream, Wallace. Why would those two devils raid together?”

“I’ve dreamt prophecy before,” Bigfoot said. “Shad’s right about the Indians. I smell ’em too.”

“What’s this—where are they?” Major Chevallie asked, just as the norther hit with its full force. There was a general scramble for guns and cover. Long Bill Coleman found the anxiety too much for his overburdened stomach. He grabbed his rifle, but then had to bend and puke before he could seek cover.

The cold wind swirled white dust through the camp. Most of the Rangers had taken cover behind little hummocks of sand, or chaparral bushes. Only Matilda was unaffected; she continued to lay strips of greenish turtle meat onto the campfire. The first cuts were already dripping and crackling.

Old Shadrach mounted and went galloping north, his long rifle across his saddle. Bigfoot Wallace grabbed a rifle and vanished into the sage.

“What do we do with this mare, Gus?” Call asked. He had only been a Ranger six weeks—his one problem with the work was that it was almost impossible to get precise instructions in a time of crisis. Now he finally had the Mexican mare saddled, but everyone in camp was lying behind sandhills with their rifles ready. Even Gus had grabbed his old gun and taken cover.

Major Chevallie was attempting to unhobble his horse, but he had no dexterity and was making a slow job of it.

“You boys, come help me!” he yelled—from the precipitate behavior of Shadrach and Bigfoot, the most experienced men in the troop, he assumed that the camp was in danger of being overrun.

Gus and Call ran to the Major’s aid. The wind was so cold that Gus even thought it prudent to button the top button of his flannel shirt.

“Goddamn this wind!” the Major said. During breakfast he had been rereading a letter from his dear wife, Jane. He had read the letter at least twenty times, but it was the only letter he had with him and he did love his winsome Jane. When the business about Gomez and Buffalo Hump came up he had casually stuffed the letter in his coat pocket, but he didn’t get it in securely, and now the whistling wind had snatched it. It was a long letter—his dear Jane was lavish with detail of circumstances back in Virginia—and now several pages of it were blowing away, in the general direction of Mexico.

“Here, boys, fetch my letter!” the Major said. “I can’t afford to lose my letter. I’ll finish saddling this horse.”

Call and Gus left the Major to finish cinching his saddle on his big sorrel and began to chase the letter, some of which had sailed quite a distance downwind. Both of them kept looking over their shoulders, expecting to see the Indians charging.

Call had not had time to fetch his rifle—his only weapon was a pistol.

Thanks to his efforts with the mare, the talk of torture and suicide had been hard to follow. Call liked to do things correctly, but was in doubt as to the correct way to dispatch himself, should he suddenly be surrounded by Comanches.

“What was it Bigfoot said about shooting out your brains?” he asked Gus, his lanky pal.

Gus had run down four pages of the Major’s lengthy letter. Call had three pages. Gus didn’t seem to be particularly concerned about the prospect of Comanche capture—his nonchalant approach to life could be irksome in times of conflict.

“I’d go help Matty clean her turtle if I thought she’d give me a poke,” Gus said.

“Gus, there’s Indians coming,” Call said. “Just tell me what Bigfoot said about shooting out your brains.

“That whore don’t need no help with that turtle,” he added.

“Oh, you’re supposed to shoot through the eyeball,” Gus said. “I’ll be damned if I would, though. I need both eyes to look at whores.”

“I should have kept my rifle handier,” Call said, annoyed with himself for having neglected sound procedure. “Do you see any Indians yet?”

“No, but I see Josh Corn taking a shit,” Gus said, pointing at their friend Josh. He was squatting behind a sage bush, rifle at the ready, while he did his business.

“I guess he must think it’s his last chance before he gets scalped,” Gus added.

Major Chevallie jumped on his sorrel and started to race after Shadrach, but had scarcely cleared the camp before he reined in his horse. Call could just see him, in the swirling dust—the plain to the north of the camp had become a wall of sand.

“I wonder how we can get some money—I sure do need a poke,” Gus said. He had turned his back to the wind and was casually reading the Major’s letter, an action that shocked Call.

“That’s the Major’s letter,” he pointed out. “You got no business reading it.”

“Well, it don’t say much anyway,” Gus said, handing the pages to Call. “I thought it might be racy, but it ain’t.”

“If I ever write a letter, I don’t want to catch you reading it,” Call said. “I think Shad’s coming back.” His eyes were stinging, from staring into the dust.

There seemed to be figures approaching camp from the north. Call couldn’t make them out clearly, and Gus didn’t seem to be particularly interested. Once he began to think about whores he had a hard time pulling his mind off the subject.

“If we could catch a Mexican we could steal his money—he might have enough that we could buy quite a few pokes,” Gus said, as they strolled back to camp.

Major Chevallie waited on his sorrel, watching. Two figures seemed to be walking. Then Bigfoot fell in with them. Shadrach appeared on his horse, a few steps behind the figures.

All around the camp Rangers began to stand up and dust the sand off their clothes. Matilda, unaffected by the crisis, was still cooking her turtle. The bloody shell lay by the campfire. Call smelled the sizzling meat and realized he was hungry.

“Why, it’s just an old woman and a boy,” he said when he finally got a clear view of the two figures trudging through the sandstorm, flanked on one side by Shadrach and on the other by Bigfoot Wallace.

“Shoot, I doubt either one of them has got a cent on them,” Gus said. “I think we ought to sneak off across the river and catch a Mexican while it’s still early.”

“Just wait,” Call said. He was anxious to see the captives, if they were captives.

“I swear,” Long Bill said. “I think that old woman’s blind. That boy’s leading her.”

Long Bill was right. A boy of about ten, who looked more Mexican than Indian, walked slowly toward the campfire, leading an old white-haired Indian woman—Call had never seen anyone who looked as old as the old woman.

When they came close enough to the fire to smell the sizzling meat, the boy began to make a strange sound. It wasn’t speech, exactly—it was more like a moan.

“What’s he wanting?” Matilda asked—she was unnerved by the sound.

“Why, a slice or two of your turtle meat, I expect,” Bigfoot said. “More than likely he’s hungry.”

“Then why don’t he ask?” Matilda said.

“He can’t ask, Matilda,” Bigfoot said.

“Why not, ain’t he got a tongue?” Matilda asked.

“Nope—no tongue,” Bigfoot said. “Somebody cut it out.”

2.

THE NORTH WIND BLEW harder, hurling the sands and soils of the great plain of Texas toward Mexico. It soon obliterated vision. Shadrach and Major Chevallie, mounted, could not see the ground. Men could not see across the campfire. Call found his rifle, but when he tried to sight, discovered that he could not see to the end of the barrel. The sand peppered them like fine shot, and it rode a cold wind. The horses could only turn their backs to it; so did the men. Most put their saddles over their heads, and their saddle blankets too. Matilda’s bloody turtle shell soon filled with sand. The campfire was almost smothered. Men formed a human wall to the north of it, to keep it from guttering out. Bigfoot and Shadrach tied bandanas around their faces—Long Bill had a bandana but it blew away and was never found. Matilda gave up cooking and sat with her back to the wind, her head bent between her knees. The boy with no tongue reached into the guttering campfire and took two slices of the sizzling turtle meat. One he gave to the old blind woman—although the meat was tough and scalding, he gulped his portion in only three bites.

Kirker and Glanton, the scalp hunters, sat together with their backs to the wind. They stared through the fog of sand, appraising the boy and the old woman. Kirker took out his scalping knife and a small whetstone. He tried to spit on the whetstone, but the wind took the spit away; Kirker began to sharpen the knife anyway. The old woman turned her sightless eyes toward the sound—she spoke to the boy, in a language Call had never heard. But the boy had no tongue, and couldn’t answer.

Even through the howling of the wind, Call could hear the grinding sound, as Kirker whetted his scalping knife. Gus heard it too, but his mind had not moved very far from his favorite subject, whores.

“Be hard to poke in a wind like this,” he surmised. “Your whore would fill up with sand—unless you went careful, you’d scrape yourself raw.”

Call ignored this comment, thinking it foolish.

“Kirker and Glanton ain’t Rangers—I don’t know why the Major lets ’em ride with the troop,” he said.

“It’s a free country, how could he stop them?” Gus asked, though he had to admit that the scalp hunters were unsavory company. Their gear smelled of blood, and they never washed. Gus agreed with Matilda that it was good to keep clean. He splashed himself regularly, if there was water available.

“He could shoot ’em—I’d shoot ’em, if I was in command,” Call said. “They’re low killers, in my opinion.”

Only the day before there had nearly been a ruckus with Kirker and Glanton. The two came riding in from the south, having taken eight scalps. The scalps hung from Kirker’s saddle. A buzzing cloud of flies surrounded them, although the blood on the scalps had dried. Most of the Rangers gave Kirker a wide berth; he was a thin man with three gappy teeth, which gave his smile a cruel twist. Glanton was larger and lazier—he slept more than anyone else in the troop and would even fall asleep and start snoring while mounted on his horse. Shadrach had no fear of either man, and neither did Bigfoot Wallace. When Kirker dismounted, Shadrach and Bigfoot walked over to examine his trophies. Shadrach fingered one of the scalps and looked at Bigfoot, who swatted the cloud of flies away briefly and sniffed a time or two at the hair.

“Comanche—who said you could smell ’em?” Kirker asked. He was chewing on some antelope jerky that Black Sam, the cook, had provided. The sight of the old mountain man and the big scout handling his new trophies annoyed him.

“We picked all eight of them off, at a waterhole,” Glanton said. “I shot four and so did John.”

“That’s a pure lie,” Bigfoot said. “Eight Comanches could string you and Kirker out from here to Santa Fe. If you was ever unlucky enough to run into that many at once, we wouldn’t be having to smell your damn stink anymore.”

He waved at Major Chevallie, who strolled over, looking uncomfortable. He drew his pistol, a precaution the Major always took when he sensed controversy. With his pistol drawn, decisive judgment could be reached and reached quickly.

“These low dogs have been killing Mexicans, Major,” Bigfoot said. “They probably took supper with some little family and then shot ’em all and took their hair.”

“That would be unneighborly behavior, if true,” Major Chevallie said. He looked at the scalps, but didn’t touch them.

“This ain’t Indian hair,” Shadrach said. “Indian hair smells Indian, but this don’t. This hair is Mexican.”

“It’s Comanche hair and you can both go to hell,” Kirker said. “If you need a ticket I can provide it.”

The gap-toothed Kirker carried three pistols and a knife, and usually kept his rifle in the crook of his arm, where it was now.

“Sit down, Kirker, I’ll not have you roughhousing with my scouts,” the Major said.

“Roughhousing, hell,” Kirker said. He flushed red when he was angry, and a blue vein popped out alongside his nose.

“I’ll finish them right here, if they don’t leave my scalps alone,” he added. Glanton had his eyes only half open, but his hand was on his pistol, a fact both Bigfoot and Shadrach ignored.

“There’s no grease, Major,” Bigfoot said. “Indians grease their hair—take a Comanche scalp and you’ll have grease up to your elbow. Kirker ain’t even sly. He could have greased this hair if he wanted to fool us, but he didn’t. I expect he was too lazy.”

“Get away from them scalps—they’re government property now,” Kirker said. “I took ’em and I intend to collect my bounty.”

Shadrach looked at the Major—he didn’t believe the Major was firm, although it was undeniable that he was an accurate shot.

“If a Mexican posse shows up, let ’em have these two,” he advised. “This ain’t Indian hair, and what’s more, it ain’t grown-up hair. These two went over to Mexico and killed a passel of children.”

Kirker merely sneered.

“Hair’s hair,” he said. “This is government property now, and you’re welcome to keep your goddamn hands off it.”

Call and Gus waited, expecting the Major to shoot Kirker, and possibly Glanton too, but the Major didn’t shoot. Bigfoot and Shadrach walked away, disgusted. Shadrach mounted, crossed the river, and was gone for several hours. Kirker kept on chewing his antelope jerky, and Glanton went sound asleep, leaning against his horse.

Major Chevallie did look at Kirker hard. He knew he ought to shoot the two men and leave them to the flies. Shadrach’s opinion was no doubt accurate: the men had been killing Mexican children; Mexican children were a lot easier to hunt than Comanches.

But the Major didn’t shoot. His troop was in an uncertain position, vulnerable to attack at any minute, and Kirker and Glanton made two more fighting men, adding two guns to the company’s meager strength. If there was a serious scrape, one or both of them might be killed anyway. If not, they could always be executed at a later date.

“Stay this side of the river from now on,” the Major said—he still had his pistol in his hand. “If either of you cross it again, I’ll hunt you down like dogs.”

Kirker didn’t flinch.

“We ain’t dogs, though—we’re wolves—at least I am. You won’t be catching me, if I go. As for Glanton, you can have him. I’m tired of listening to his goddamn snores.”

Gus soon forgot the incident, but Call didn’t. He listened to Kirker sharpen his knife and wished he had the authority to kill the man himself. In his view Kirker was a snake, and worse than a snake. If you discovered a snake in your bedclothes, the sensible thing would be to kill it.

Major Chevallie had looked right at the snake, but hadn’t killed it.

The sandstorm blew for another hour, until the camp and everything in it was covered with sand. When it finally blew out, men discovered that they couldn’t find utensils they had carelessly laid down before the storm began. The sky overhead was a cold blue. The plain in all directions was level with sand; only the tops of sage bushes and chaparral broke the surface. The Rio Grande was murky and brown. The little mare, still snubbed to the tree, was in sand up to her knees. All the men stripped naked in order to shake as much sand as possible out of their clothes; but more sand filtered in, out of their hair and off their collars. Gus brushed the branch of a mesquite tree and a shower of sand rained down on him.

Only the old Indian woman and the boy with no tongue made no attempt to rid themselves of sand. The fire had finally been smothered, but the old woman and the boy still sat by it, sand banked against their backs. To Call they hardly seemed human. They were like part of the ground.

Gus, in high spirits, decided to be a bronc rider after all. He took it into his head to ride the Mexican mare.

“I expect that storm’s got her cowed,” he said to Call.

“Gus, she ain’t cowed,” Call replied. He had the mare by the ears again, and detected no change in her attitude.

Sure enough, the mare threw Gus on the second jump. Several of the naked Rangers laughed, and went on shaking out their clothes.

3.

IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, still carrying more sand in his clothes than he would have liked, Major Chevallie attempted to question the old woman and the boy. He gave them coffee and fed them a little hardtack first, hoping it would make them talkative—but the feast, such as it was, failed in its purpose, mainly because no one in the troop spoke any Comanche.

The Major had supposed Bigfoot Wallace to be adept in the tongue, but Bigfoot firmly denied any knowledge of it.

“Why no, Major,” Bigfoot said. “I’ve made it a practice to stay as far from the Comanche as I can get,” Bigfoot said. “What few I ever met face-on I shot. Some others have shot at me, but we never stopped to palaver.”

The old woman wore a single bear tooth on a rawhide cord around her neck. The tooth was the size of a small pocketknife. Several of the men looked at it with envy; most of them would have been happy to own a bear tooth that large.

“She must have been a chief’s woman,” Long Bill speculated. “Otherwise why would a squaw get to keep a fine grizzly tooth like that?”

Matilda Roberts knew five or six words of Comanche and tried them all on the old woman, without result. The old woman sat where she had settled when she walked into the camp, backed by a hummock of sand. Her rheumy eyes were focused on the campfire, or on what had been the campfire.

The tongueless boy, still hungry, dug most of the sandy turtle meat out of the ashes of the campfire and ate it. No one contested him, although Matilda dusted the sand off a piece or two and gnawed at the meat herself. The boy perked up considerably, once he had eaten the better part of Matilda’s snapping turtle. He did his best to talk, but all that came out were moans and gurgles. Several of the men tried to talk to him in sign, but got nowhere.

“Goddamn Shadrach, where did he go?” the Major asked. “We’ve got a Comanche captive here, and the only man we have who speaks Comanche leaves.”

As the day wore on, Gus and Call took turns getting pitched off the mare. Call once managed to stay on her five hops, which was the best either of them achieved. The Rangers soon lost interest in watching the boys get pitched around. A few got up a card game. Several others took a little target practice, using cactus apples as targets. Bigfoot Wallace pared his toenails, several of which had turned coal black as the result of his having worn footgear too small for his feet—it was that or go barefooted, and in the thorny country they were in, bare feet would have been a handicap.

Toward sundown Call and Gus were assigned first watch. They took their position behind a good clump of chaparral, a quarter of a mile north of the camp. Major Chevallie had been making another attempt to converse with the old Comanche woman, as they were leaving camp. He tried sign, but the old woman looked at him, absent, indifferent.

“Shadrach just rode off and he ain’t rode back,” Call said. “I feel better when Shadrach’s around.”

“I’d feel better if there were more whores,” Gus commented. In the afternoon he had made another approach to Matilda Roberts, only to be rebuffed.

“I should have stayed on the riverboats,” he added. “I never lacked for whores, on the riverboats.”

Call was watching the north. He wondered if it was really true that Shadrach and Bigfoot could smell Indians. Of course if you got close to an Indian, or to anybody, you could smell them. There were times on sweaty days when he could easily smell Gus, or any other Ranger who happened to be close by. Black Sam, the cook, had a fairly strong smell, and so did Ezekiel—the latter had not bothered to wash the whole time Call had known him.

But dirt and sweat weren’t what Bigfoot and Shadrach had been talking about, when they said they smelled Indians. The old woman and the boy had been nearly a mile away, when they claimed to smell them. Surely not even the best scout could smell a person that far away.

“There could have been more Indians out there, when Shad said he smelled them,” Call speculated. “There could be a passel out there, just waiting.”

Gus McCrae took guard duty a good deal more lightly than his companion, Woodrow Call. He looked at his time on guard as a welcome escape from the chores that cropped up around camp—gathering firewood, for example, or chopping it, or saddle-soaping the Major’s saddle. Since he and Woodrow were the youngest Rangers in the troop, they were naturally expected to do most of the chores. Several times they had even been required to shoe horses, although Black Sam, the cook, was also a more than adequate blacksmith.

Gus found such tasks irksome—he believed he had been put on earth to enjoy himself, and there was no enjoyment to be derived from shoeing horses. Horses were heavy animals—most of the ones he shoed had a tendency to lean on him, once he picked up a foot.

Drinking mescal was far more to his liking—in fact he had a few swallows left, in a small jug he had managed to appropriate. He had kept the jug buried in the sand all day, lest some thirsty Ranger discover it and drain the mescal. He owned a woolen serape, purchased in a stall in San Antonio, and had managed to sneak the jug out of camp under the serape.

When he brought it out and took a swig, Call looked annoyed.

“If the Major caught you drinking on guard he’d shoot you,” Call said. It was true, too. The Major tolerated many foibles in his troop, but he did demand sobriety of the men assigned to keep guard. They were camped not far from the great Comanche war trail—the merciless raiders from the north could appear at any moment. Even momentary inattention on the part of the guards could imperil the whole troop.

“Well, but how could he catch me?” Gus asked. “He’s trying to talk to that old woman—he’d have to sneak up on us to catch me, and I’d have to be drunker than this not to notice a fat man sneaking up.”

It was certainly true that Major Chevallie was fat. He outweighed Matilda by a good fifty pounds, and Matilda was not small. The Major was short, too, which made his girth all the more noticeable. Still, he was the Major. Just because he hadn’t shot the scalp hunters didn’t mean he wouldn’t shoot Gus.

“I don’t believe you was ever on a riverboat—why would they hire you?” Call asked. At times of irritation he began to remember all the lies Gus had told him. Gus McCrae had no more regard for truth than he did for the rules of rangering.

“Why, of course I was,” Gus said. “I was a top pilot for a dern year—I’m a Tennessee boy. I can run one of them riverboats as well as the next man. I only run aground once, in all the time I worked.”

The truth of that was that he had once sneaked aboard a riverboat for two days; when he was discovered, he was put off on a mud bar, near Dubuque. A young whore had hidden him for the two days—the captain had roundly chastised her when Gus was discovered. Shortly after he was put off, the riverboat ran aground—that was the one true fact in the story. The tale sounded grand to his green friend, though. Woodrow Call had got no farther in the world than his uncle’s scratchy farm near Navasota. Woodrow’s parents had been taken by the smallpox, which is why he was raised by the uncle, a tyrant who stropped him so hard that when Woodrow got old enough to follow the road to San Antonio, he ran off. It was in San Antonio that the two of them had met—or rather, that Call had found Gus asleep against the wall of a saloon, near the river. Call worked for a Mexican blacksmith at the time, stirring the forge and helping the old smith with the horseshoeing that went on from dawn till dark. The Mexican, Jesus, a kindly old man who hummed sad harmonies all day as he worked, allowed Call to sleep on a pallet of nail sacks in a small shed behind the forge. Blacksmithing was dirty work. Call had been on his way to the river to wash off some of the smudge from his work when he noticed a lanky youth, sound asleep against the wall of the little adobe saloon. At first he thought the stranger might be dead, so profound were his slumbers. Killings were not uncommon in the streets of San Antonio—Call thought he ought to stop and check, since if the boy was dead it would have to be reported.

It turned out, though, that Gus was merely so fatigued that he was beyond caring whether he was counted among the living or among the dead. He had traveled in a tight stagecoach for ten days and nine nights, making the trip from Baton Rouge through the pines of east Texas to San Antonio. Upon arrival, his fellow passengers decided that Gus had been with them long enough; he was in such a stupor of fatigue that he offered no resistance when they rolled him out. He could not remember how long he had been sleeping against the saloon; it was his impression that he had slept about a week. That night Call let Gus share his pallet of nail sacks, and the two had been friends ever since. It was Gus who decided they should apply for the Texas Rangers—Call would never have thought himself worthy of such a position. It was Gus, too, who boldly approached the Major when word got out that a troop was being formed whose purpose—other than hanging whatever horsethieves or killers turned up—was to explore a stage route to El Paso. Fortunately, Major Chevallie had not been hard to convince—he took one look at the two healthy-looking boys and hired them at the princely sum of three dollars a month. They would be furnished with mounts, blankets, and a rifle apiece. Departure was immediate; saddles proved to be the main problem. Neither Gus nor Call had a saddle, or a pistol either. Finally the Major intervened on their behalf with an old German who owned a hardware store and saddle shop, the back of which was piled with single-tree saddles in bad repair and guns of every description, most of which didn’t work. Finally two pistols were extracted that looked as if they might shoot if primed a little; and also two single-tree rigs with tattered leather that the German agreed to part with for a dollar apiece, pistols thrown in.

Major Chevallie advanced the two dollars, and the next morning at dawn, he, Call, Gus, Shadrach, Bob Bascom, Long Bill Coleman, Ezekiel Moody, Josh Corn, one-eyed Johnny Carthage, Blackie Slidell, Rip Green, and Black Sam, leading his kitchen mule, trotted out of San Antonio. Call had never been so happy in his life—overnight he had become a Texas Ranger, the grandest thing anyone could possibly be.

Gus, though, was irritated at the lack of ceremony attending their departure. A scabby dog barked a few times, but no inhabitants lined the streets to cheer them on. Gus thought there should at least have been a bugler.

“I’d blow a bugle myself, if one was available,” he said.

Call thought the remark wrongheaded. Even if they had a bugle, and if Gus could blow it, who would listen to it, except a few Mexicans and a donkey or two? It was enough that they were Rangers—two days before they had simply been homeless boys.

Bigfoot Wallace, the scout, didn’t catch up until the next day—at the time of their departure he had been in jail. Apparently he had thrown a deputy sheriff out the second-floor window of the community’s grandest whorehouse. The deputy suffered a broken collarbone, an annoyance sufficient to cause the sheriff to jail Bigfoot for a week.

Gus McCrae, a newcomer to Texas, had never heard of Bigfoot Wallace and saw no reason to be awed. Throwing a deputy sheriff out a window did not seem to him to be a particularly impressive feat.

“Now, if he’d thrown the governor out, that would have been a fine thing,” Gus said.

Call thought his friend’s comment absurd. Why would the governor be in a whorehouse, anyway? Bigfoot Wallace was the most respected scout on the Texas frontier; even in Navasota, far to the east, Bigfoot’s name was known and his exploits talked about.

“They say he’s been all the way to China,” Call explained. “He knows every creek in Texas, and whether it’s boggy or not, and he’s a first-rate Indian killer besides.”

“Myself, I’d rather know every whore,” Gus said. “You can have a lot more fun with whores than you can with governors.”

Call had seen several whores on the street, but had never visited one. Although he had the inclination, he had never had the money. Gus McCrae, though, seemed to have spent his life in the company of whores—though he had once mentioned that he had a mother and three sisters back in Tennessee, he preferred to talk mainly about whores, often to the point of tedium.

Call, though, had the greatest respect for Bigfoot Wallace; he intended to study the man and learn as many of his wilderness skills as possible. Though most of the older Rangers were well versed in woodcraft, Bigfoot and Shadrach were clearly the two masters. If the company came to a fork in a creek or river while the scouts were ranging ahead, the company waited until one of them showed up and told it which fork to take. Major Chevallie had never been west of San Antonio—once they left the settlements behind and started toward the Pecos, he allowed his accomplished scouts to choose a route.

It was Shadrach who took them south, into the lonely country of sage and sand, where the two boys were now crouched behind their chaparral bush. In San Antonio there had been talk that war with Mexico was brewing—early on, the Major had instructed the troop to fire on any Mexican who seemed hostile.

“Better to be safe than sorry,” he said, and many heads nodded.

In fact, though, the only Mexican they had seen was the unfortunate driver of the donkey cart. In the western reaches, no one was quite certain where Mexico stopped and Texas began. The Rio Grande made a handy border, but neither Major Chevallie nor anyone else considered it to be particularly official.

Mexicans, hostile or otherwise, didn’t occupy much of the troop’s attention, almost all of which was reserved for the Comanches. Call had yet to see a Comanche Indian, though throughout the trek, Long Bill, Rip Green, and other Rangers had assured him that the Comanches were sure to show up in the next hour or two, bent on scalping and torture.

“I wonder how big Comanches are?” he asked Gus, as they peered north into the silent darkness.

“About the size of Matilda, I’ve heard,” Gus said.

“That old woman ain’t the size of Matilda,” Call pointed out. “She’s no taller than Rip.”

Rip Green was the smallest Ranger, standing scarcely five feet high. He also lacked a thumb on his right hand, having shot it off himself while cleaning a pistol he had neglected to unload.

“Yes, but she’s old, Woodrow,” Gus said. “I expect she’s shriveled up.”

He had just consumed the last of his mescal, and was feeling gloomy at the thought of a long watch with no liquor. At least he had a serape, though. Call had no coat—he intended to purchase one with his first wages. He owned two shirts, and wore them both on frosty mornings, when the thorns of the chaparral bushes were rimmed with white.

Just then a wolf howled far to the north, where they were looking. Another wolf joined the first one. Then, nearer by, there was the yip of a coyote.

“They say an Indian can imitate any sound,” Gus remarked. “They can fool you into thinking they’re a wolf or a coyote or an owl or a cricket.”

“I doubt a Comanche would pretend to be a cricket,” Call said.

“Well, a locust then,” Gus said. “Locusts buzz. You get a bunch of them buzzing and it’s hard to hear.”

Again they heard the wolf, and again, the coyote.

“It’s Indians talking,” Gus said. “They’re talking in animal.”

“We don’t know, though,” Call said. “I seen a wolf just yesterday. There’s plenty of coyotes, too. It could just be animals.”

“No, it ain’t, it’s Comanches,” Gus said, standing up. “Let’s go shoot one. I expect if we killed three or four the Major would raise our wages.”

Call thought it was bold thinking. They were already a good distance from camp—the campfire was only a faint flicker behind them. Clouds had begun to come in, hiding the stars. Suppose they went farther and got caught? All the tortures Bigfoot had described might be visited on them. Besides, their orders were to stand watch, not to go Indian hunting.

“I ain’t going,” Call said. “That ain’t what we were supposed to do.”

“I doubt that fat fool is a real major, anyway,” Gus said. He was restless. Sitting half the night by a bush did not appeal to him much. It was undoubtedly a long way to a whorehouse from where they sat, but at least there might be Indians to fight. Better a fight than nothing; with no more mescal to drink, his prospects were meager.

Call, though, had not responded to the call of adventure. He was still squatting by the chaparral bush.

“Why, Gus, he is too a major,” Call said. “You saw how the soldiers saluted him, back in San Antonio.

“Even if he ain’t a major, he gave us a job,” he reminded his friend. “We’re earning three dollars a month. Long Bill says we’ll get all the Indian fighting we want before we get back to the settlements.”

“Bye, I’m going exploring,” Gus said. “I’ve heard there’s gold mines out in this part of the country.”

“Gold mines,” Call said. “How would you notice a gold mine in the middle of the night, and what would you do with one if you did notice it? You ain’t even got a spade.”

“No, but think of all the whores I could buy if I had a gold mine,” Gus said. “I could even buy a whorehouse. I’d have twenty girls and they’d all be pretty. If I didn’t feel like letting in no customers, I’d do the work myself.”

With that, he walked off a few steps.

“Ain’t you coming?” he asked, when he heard no footsteps behind him.

“No, I was told to stand guard, not to go prospecting,” Call said. “I aim to stand guard till it’s my turn to sleep.

“If you go off and get captured, the Major won’t like it one bit, either,” Call reminded him. “Neither will you. Remember how that Mexican screamed.”

Gus left. Woodrow Call was stubborn—why waste a night arguing with a stubborn man? Gus walked rapidly through the cold night, toward where the wolf had howled. It irked him that his friend was so disposed to obey orders. The way he looked at it, being a Ranger meant you could range, which was what he intended to do.

He thought best to cock his gun, though, in case he was taken by surprise. He had heard men scream while dentists were working on them, but in his experience no one undergoing dentistry had screamed half as loud as the captured Mexican.

After strolling nearly twenty minutes through the sandy country, Gus decided to stop and take his bearings. He looked back to see if he could spot the campfire, but the long plain was dark. Thunder had begun to rumble, and in the west, there was a flicker of lightning.

While he was stopped he thought he heard something behind him and whirled in time to spot a badger, not three feet away. The badger was bumbling along, not watching where it was going. Gus didn’t shoot it, but he did kick at it. He was irritated at the animal for startling him so. It was the kind of thing that could affect a man’s nerves, and it affected his. Because of the badger’s intrusion Gus felt a strong urge to get back to his guard post. Walking around at night didn’t accomplish much. It was annoying that Woodrow Call had been too dull to accompany him.

On the walk back Gus tried to think of some adventure he could describe that would make his friend envious. The campfire had not yet come in sight. Probably the Rangers had been too lazy to gather sufficient firewood, and had let the fire burn down. Gus began to wonder if he was holding a true course. It was hard to see landmarks on a starless night, and there were precious few landmarks in that part of the country, anyway. Of course the river was in the direction he was walking, but the river twisted and curved; if he just depended on the river he might end up several miles from camp. He might even miss breakfast, or what passed for breakfast.

While he was walking, the wolf howled again. Gus decided it was probably just a wolf after all. The boredom of guard duty had caused him to imagine it was a Comanche. He felt some irritation. The wolf had distracted him with its howling, and now he was beginning to get the feeling that he was lost. He had always believed that he had a perfect sense of direction. Even when he was put off on a mud bar in the middle of the Mississippi River, he didn’t get lost. He walked straight on to Dubuque. Of course, it was not hard to find Dubuque—it was there in plain sight, on its bluff. But there were willow thickets and some heavy underbrush between the river and the town. If he had been drunk he might well have gotten lost and ended up pointed toward St. Louis or somewhere. Instead he had strolled straight into Dubuque and had persuaded a bartender to draw him a mug of beer—it had been a thirsty trip, on the old boat. That Iowa beer had tasted good.

Now, though, there was no Mississippi, and no bluff. He could walk for a month in any direction and not find a town the size of Dubuque, or a bartender willing to draw him a mug of beer just because he showed up and asked. He had only owned his weapons for three weeks and so far had not been able to hit anything he shot at, although he believed he might have winged a wild turkey, back along the Colorado River. He might walk around Texas until he starved, due to his inability to hit the kind of game they had in Texas. It was skittery game, for the most part—back in Tennessee the deer were almost as docile as cows, and almost as fat. He had killed two or three from the back porch of the old home place, whereas here in Texas, deer hardly let you get within a mile of them.

Gus stopped and listened for a bit. Sometimes the Rangers sang at night—there had been plenty of whooping and dancing the night they drank the mescal. He felt if he listened he might hear Josh Corn’s harmonica or some other music. Black Sam sometimes let loose with his darky hymns, when he was in low spirits; Sam had a full voice and could be heard a long way, even when he was singing low.

But when Gus stopped to listen, the plain around him was absolutely silent—so silent that the silence itself rang in his ears; the night was as dark as it was silent, too. Gus could see nothing at all, except intermittently, when the lightning flickered. It was because of the lightning that he had spotted the offensive badger that had managed to affect his nerves.

He took a few steps, and stopped. After all, it wouldn’t be night forever, and he had not gone that far from camp. The simplest thing to do would be to wrap up good in his San Antonio serape and sleep for a few hours. With dawn at his back he could be in camp in a few minutes. If he kept walking he might veer off into the great emptiness and never find his way back. The sensible thing to do was wait. He could yell and hope Woodrow Call responded, but Woodrow had been too dull to move off his guard post; he might be too dull to yell back.

The lightning was coming closer, which offered a sort of solution. He could be patient, mark his course, and move from flash to flash. A few sprinkles of rain wet his face. He could tell from the way the sage smelled that a shower was coming—he could even hear the patter of rain not far to the west. For a moment he squatted, tucking his serape around him—if it was going to turn wet, he was ready. Then a bold streak of lightning split the sky. For a moment it lit the prairie, bright as day. And yet Gus saw nothing familiar—no river, no campfire, no chaparral bush, no Call.

No sooner had he wrapped his serape around him and got ready for the rain squall than he was up and walking fast through the sage. He had meant to wait—it was sensible to wait, and yet a feeling had come over him that told him to move. The feeling told him to run, in fact—he was already moving at a rapid trot, though he stopped for a moment to lower the hammer of his pistol. He didn’t intend to shoot off his thumb like young Rip Green. Then he trotted on, just short of a run.

As he trotted, Gus began to realize that he was scared. The feeling that came over him, that brought him to his feet and started him trotting, was fear. It was such an unexpected and unfamiliar feeling that he had not been able to put a name to it, at first. Rarely since early childhood had he been afraid. Creaking boards in the old family barn made him think of ghosts, and he had avoided the barn, even to the point of being stropped for a failure to do the chores, when he was small. Since then, though, he had rarely seen anything that he feared. Once in Arkansas he had come across a bear eating a dead horse and had worried a bit; he was unarmed at the time, and was sensible enough to know that he was no match for a bear. But since he had got his growth, he had not encountered much that put real fear in him—just that Arkansas bear.

What had him breathing short and stumbling now was a sense that somebody was near—somebody he couldn’t see. When he suggested that the wolf might be an Indian, he had just been joshing Call. He had felt restless, and wanted to take a stroll. If he turned up a gold mine, so much the better. He didn’t seriously expect to kill an Indian, though. He had no desire to stumble onto a Comanche Indian, or any other Indian, just at that time. It had merely been something to twit Call about. He had never seen a Comanche Indian and could not work up enough of a picture of one to know what to expect, but he didn’t suppose that a Comanche could be as large as that bear, or as fierce, either.

Now, though, he was driven to trot through the darkness by an overpowering sense that somebody was near, and who could it be but a Comanche Indian? It wasn’t Call—being near Call wouldn’t scare him. Yet he was near somebody—somebody he didn’t want to be near—somebody who meant him harm. Shadrach and Bigfoot claimed to be able to smell Indians, and smell them from a considerable distance, but he didn’t have that ability. All he could smell was the wet sage and the damp desert. It wasn’t because he could smell that he knew somebody was near. It was a feeling, and a feeling that came from a part of him he didn’t even know he had. What that part told him was run, move, get away, even though the night had now divided itself into two parts, the pitch-black part and the brilliantly lit part. The brilliantly lit part, of course, was the lightning flashes, which came more frequently and turned the plain so bright that Gus had to blink his eyes. Even then the light stayed, like a line inside his eye, when the plain turned black again, so black that in his running he stumbled into chaparral and almost fell once when he struck a patch of deep sand.

It was just after the sand that the lightning began to strike so close and so constantly that Gus developed a new fear, which was that his gun barrel would draw the lightning and he would be cooked on the spot. There had been some close lightning three days back, and the Rangers, Bigfoot particularly, had told several stories of men who had been cooked by lightning. Sometimes, according to Bigfoot, the lightning even cooked the horse underneath the man.

Gus would have been willing now to risk getting himself and his horse both cooked, if he could only have a horse underneath him, in order to move faster. Just as he was thinking that thought, a great lightning bolt struck not fifty yards away, and in that moment of white brightness Gus saw the somebody he had been fearing: the Indian with a great hump of muscle or gristle between his shoulders, a hump so heavy that the man’s head bent slightly forward as he sat, like a buffalo’s.

Buffalo Hump sat alone, on a robe of some kind—he looked at Gus, with his heavy head bent and his great hump wet from the rain, as if he had been expecting his arrival. He was not more than ten feet away, no farther than the badger had been, and his eyes were like stone.

Buffalo Hump looked at Gus, and then the plain went black. In the blackness Gus ran as he had never run before, right past where the Indian sat. Lightning streaked again but Gus didn’t turn for a second look: he ran. Something tore at his leg as he brushed a thornbush, but he didn’t slow his speed. In the line inside his eyes where the lightning stayed, there was the Comanche now, the great humpbacked Indian, the most feared man on the frontier. Gus had been so close that he could almost have jumped over the man. For all he knew, Buffalo Hump was following, bent on taking his hair. His only hope was speed. With such a hump to carry, the man might not be fast.

Gus forgot everything but running. He wanted to get away from the man with the hump—if he could just run all night maybe the Rangers would wake up and come to his aid. He didn’t know whether he was running toward the river or away from it. He didn’t know if Buffalo Hump was following, or how close he might be. He just ran, afraid to stop, afraid to yell. He thought of throwing away his gun in order to get a little more speed, but he didn’t—he wanted something to shoot with, if he were cornered or brought down.

At the guard post behind the chaparral bush, Call alternated between being irritated and being worried. He was convinced his friend, who had no business leaving in the first place, was out on the plain somewhere, hopelessly lost. There was little hope of finding him before daylight, and then it was sure to be a humiliating business. Shadrach was an excellent tracker and could no doubt follow Gus’s trail, but it would cost the troop delay and aggravation.

Major Chevallie might fire Gus—even fire Call, too, for having allowed Gus to wander off. Major Chevallie expected orders to be obeyed, and Call didn’t blame him. He might tolerate some wandering on the part of the scouts—that was their job—but he wouldn’t necessarily tolerate it on the part of a private.

When the rain came there was not much Call could do but hunch over and get wet. The bush was too thorny to crawl under, and he had no coat. The lightning was bright and the thunder loud, but Call didn’t feel fearful, especially. The bright flashes at least allowed him to look around. In one of them he thought he saw a movement; he decided it was the wolf they had heard howling.

It was in another brilliant flash that he saw Gus running. The plain went black again, so black that Call wasn’t sure whether he had seen Gus or imagined him. Gus had been tearing along, running dead out. All Call could do was wait for the next flash—when it came he saw Gus again, closer, and in that flash Call saw something else: the Comanche.

The light died so quickly that Call thought he might have imagined the Indian, too. In the light he had seen the great hump, a mass half as large as the weight of most men; and yet the man was running fast after Gus, and had a lance in his hand. Call fired wildly, in the general direction of the Indian—it was dark again before his gun sounded. He thought the shot might at least distract the man with the hump. In the next flash, though, Buffalo Hump had stopped and thrown the lance—Call just saw it, splitting the rain, as it flew toward Gus, who was still running flat out—running for his life. Call fired again, with his pistol this time. Maybe Gus would hear it and take heart—although that was a faint hope. The thunderclaps were so continuous that he scarcely heard the shot himself.

Call raised his rifle, determined to be ready when the next flash came and lit the prairie. But when the flash did come, the plain was empty. Buffalo Hump was gone. The hairs stood up on Call’s neck when he failed to see the humpbacked chief. The man had just vanished on an open plain. If he moved that fast he could be anywhere. Call backed into the chaparral, mindless of the thorns, and waited. No man, not even a Comanche, could get through a clump of chaparral and attack him from the rear—certainly no man who had such a hump to carry.

Then he remembered the lance in the air, splitting the rain. He didn’t know if it had hit home. If it had, his friend Gus McCrae might be dead. Buffalo Hump might even have run up on him and scalped him, or dragged him off for torture.

The last was such an awful thought that Call couldn’t stay crouched in the thornbush. He waited until the next flash—a fair wait, for the storm was passing on to the east, and the lightning was diminishing—and then headed for where he had last seen Gus. Once the thunder quieted a little more, he meant to fire his pistol. Maybe the Rangers would hear it, if Gus couldn’t. Maybe they would come to his aid in time to stop the humpbacked Comanche from killing Gus, or dragging him off.

Yet as he waited, Call had the feeling that help, if it came, would come too late. Probably Gus was already dead. Call had seen the lance in the air—Buffalo Hump didn’t look like a man who would let fly with a lance just to miss.

When the flash came, not as bright as before, Call saw that the plain was still empty. He began to walk toward the area where he had seen Gus—it was the direction of camp, anyway. He yelled Gus’s name twice, but there was no answer. Again the hair stood up on his neck. Buffalo Hump could be anywhere. He might be crouched behind any sage bush, any clump of chaparral, waiting in the dark for the next unwary Ranger to walk by.

Call didn’t intend to be an unwary Ranger—he meant to take every precaution, but what precaution could you take on an empty plain at night with a dangerous Indian somewhere close? He wished that he could have got more instruction from Shadrach or Bigfoot about the best procedure to follow in such situations. They had fought Indians for years—they would know. But so far neither of them had said more than two words to him, and those were mostly comments about horseshoeing or some other chore.

The lightning dimmed and dimmed, as the storm moved east. Call could see no trace of Gus, but of course, between the lightning flashes the plain was pitch dark. Gus could be dead and scalped behind any of the sage bushes or clumps of chaparral.

Call walked back and forth for awhile, hoping Gus would hear him and call out. He decided shooting was unwise—if he shot anymore, Major Chevallie might chide him for wasting the ammunition.

Heartsick, sure that his friend was dead, Call began to trudge back to camp. He felt it was mainly his fault that the tragedy had occurred. He should have fought Gus, if necessary, to keep him at his post. But he hadn’t; Gus had walked off, and now all was lost.

It seemed to Call, as he walked back in dejection, that Gus should just have left him in the blacksmith’s shop. He didn’t know enough to be a Ranger—neither had his friend, and now ignorance had got Gus killed. Call was certain he was dead, too. Gus had a loud voice, louder even than Black Sam’s. If he wasn’t dead, he would be making noise.

Then, just as he was at the lowest ebb of dejection, Call heard the very voice he had supposed he would never hear again: Gus McCrae’s voice, yelling from the camp. Call ran as hard as he could toward the sound—he came running into camp so fast that Long Bill Coleman nearly shot him for a hostile.

Sure enough, though, there was Gus McCrae, alive and with his pants down. A Comanche lance protruded from his hip. The reason he was yelling was because Bigfoot and Shadrach were trying to pull it out.

4.

THE LANCE WAS STUCK so deep in Gus’s hip that Bigfoot and Shadrach together couldn’t pull it out. It was a long, heavy lance—how Gus had managed to run all that way with it dangling from his hip Call couldn’t imagine. Gus kept yelling, as the two men tugged at it. Rip Green tried to steady Gus as the two older men attempted to work the lance out. Rip alone wasn’t strong enough—Bob Bascom had to come and help hold Gus in place.

Shadrach soon grew annoyed with Gus’s yelling, which was loud.

“Shut off your goddamn bellowing,” Shadrach said. “You’re yelling loud enough to call every Indian between here and the Cimarron River.”

“There wasn’t but one Indian,” Call informed them. “He had a big hump on his back. I seen him.”

At that news, the whole camp came to attention. Bigfoot and Shadrach ceased their efforts to extract the lance. Major Chevallie had been peering into the darkness, but his head snapped around when Call mentioned the hump.

“You saw Buffalo Hump?” he said.

“He was the man who threw that lance,” Call said. “I saw him in the lightning flash. That was when he threw the lance. I thought he missed.”

“Nope, he didn’t miss,” Bigfoot said. “This is his buffalo lance. I’m surprised he wasted it on a boy.”

“I wish he hadn’t,” Gus said, his voice shaking. “I guess it’s stuck in my hipbone.”

“No, it’s nowhere near your damn hipbone,” Shadrach said. He squatted to take a better look at the lance head—then he waved Bigfoot away, twisted the lance a little, and with a hard yank, pulled it out. Gus fainted—Rip and Bob had loosened their hold for a moment; before they could recover, Gus fell forward on his face. Bob Bascom had looked aside, in order to spit tobacco. He kept so much tobacco in his mouth that he was prone to choking fits in time of action. Rip Green had just glanced at his bedroll; he was suspicious by nature and was always glancing at his bedroll to make sure no one was stealing anything from it. Both Rip and Bob were startled when Gus fell on his face—Call was, too. He had not supposed Gus McCrae would be the type to faint.

But blood was pouring out of Gus’s hip, and there seemed to be blood farther down his leg.

“Here, Sam,” Major Chevallie said, motioning to his cook. “You’re the doctor—tend to this man before he bleeds to death.”

“Need to get him closer to the fire so I can sew him up,” Sam said. He was a small man, about the size of Rip Green; his curly hair was white. Call was uncomfortable with him—he had had little experience of darkies, but he had to admit that the man cooked excellent grub and seemed to be expert in treating boils and other small ailments.

Sam quickly scooped some ash out of the campfire and used it to staunch the flow of blood. He patted ash into the wound until the bleeding stopped; while waiting for it to stop, he threaded a big darning needle.

Matilda walked up about that time, dragging her pallet. Gus’s yells had awakened her, and her mood was shaky. She kicked sand at Long Bill Coleman for no reason at all. The Mexican boy was asleep, but the old woman still sat by the fire, silent and unmoving.

“Sew that boy up before he gets conscious and starts bellowing again,” Shadrach said. “If there’s Indians around, they know where we are. This pup makes too much noise.”

“Why, they can mark our position by the fire—they wouldn’t need the yelling,” Bigfoot said. Gus soon proved to be awake enough to be sensitive to the darning needle. It took Matilda and Bigfoot and Bob Bascom to hold him steady enough that Sam could sew up his long wound.

“Why’d you kick that sand on me?” Long Bill asked Matilda while the sewing was in progress. He was a little hurt by Matilda’s evident scorn.

“Because I felt like kicking sand on a son of a bitch,” Matilda said. “You were the closest.”

“This boy’s lucky,” Sam said. “The lance missed the bone.”

“He might be lucky, but we ain’t,” Major Chevallie said. He was pacing around nervously.

“What I can’t figure out is why Buffalo Hump would be sitting out there by himself,” he added.

“He was sitting on a blanket,” Gus said. Sam had finally quit poking him with the big needle—that and the fact that he was alive made him feel a little better. Besides that, he was back in camp. He felt sure he was going to survive, and wanted to be helpful if he could.

“I ran right past him, that’s why he took after me,” Gus said. “He had a terrible big hump.”

Gus felt that he might want to relax and snooze, but that plan was interrupted by the old Comanche woman, who suddenly began to wail. The sound of her high wailing gave everybody a start.

“What’s wrong with her? Now she’s howling,” Long Bill asked.

Shadrach went over to the old woman and spoke with her in Comanche, but she continued to wail. Shadrach waited patiently until she stopped.

“She’s a vision woman,” Shadrach said. “My grandma was a vision woman too. She would let out wails when she had some bad vision, just like this poor old soul.”

Call wanted the old woman to quiet down—her wailing had a bad effect on the whole camp. Her wails were as sad as the sound of the wind as it sighed over the empty flats. He didn’t want to hear such disturbing sounds, and none of the other Rangers did, either.

Shadrach still squatted by the old woman, talking to her in her own tongue. The wind blew swirls of fine sand around them.

“Well, what now? What’s she saying?” Major Chevallie asked.

“She says Buffalo Hump is going to cut off her nose,” Shadrach said. “She was one of his father’s wives—I guess she didn’t behave none too well. Her people put her out to die, and Buffalo Hump heard about it. Now he wants to find her and cut off her nose.”

“I’d think he had better things to do,” the Major said. “She’s old, she’ll die. Why bother with her nose?”

“Because she behaved bad to his father,” Shadrach said, a little impatiently. Major Chevallie’s ignorance of Indian habits often annoyed him.

“I don’t like it that he’s out there,” Long Bill said. “Once he cuts this old woman’s nose off he might keep cutting. He might cut a piece or two off all of us, before he stops.”

“Why, if you’re worried, just go kill him, Bill,” Bigfoot said.

“He’s a swift runner, even with that hump,” Gus informed them. “He almost caught me, and I’m fleet.”

Major Chevallie kept pacing back and forth, his pistol cocked.

“Let’s mount up and go,” he said abruptly. “We’re not in a secure position here—I believe it would be best to ride.”

“Now, hold still,” Shadrach insisted. “This is a vision woman talking. Let’s see what else she has to say.”

He went to the fire, poured some coffee in a tin cup, and handed it to the old woman. The Major didn’t like it that Shadrach had ignored his order—but he took it. He sat down by Matilda, who was still in a heavy mood.

“I still don’t see why he would go to so much trouble just to cut off an old woman’s nose,” he muttered, mainly to himself. Bigfoot Wallace heard him, though.

“You ain’t a Comanche,” Bigfoot said. “Comanches expect their wives to stay in the right tent.”

Major Chevallie thought of his own dear wife, Jane. If it had not been for the scrape in Baltimore, he could be home with her right then; they might be nestled together, in a nice feather bed. How long would it be before he could return to their snug stone house in Loudon County? Would he ever return to it, or to his ardent Jane? He felt low, very low. It was too dusty in Texas. Every bite of food he had attempted to eat, all day, had been covered with grit. The large whore beside him was rough; she would never smell as good as his Jane. But Matilda was there, and Jane wasn’t. Matilda was likable, despite being rough; the Major was feeling desperate. The Comanche war chief was within earshot of his camp. A minute’s relief with Matilda would be helpful, but of course it was not a time to suggest to the troop that he was unmilitary. It was clear already that Bigfoot and Shadrach had a low opinion of his leadership. Chevallie was an old name, much respected in the Tidewater, but it meant nothing west of the Pecos. Ability was all that counted, in the West, in such a country, among such men—out West the ability to waltz gracefully did not help a man keep his scalp.

The fact was, he himself had no great opinion of his own military skills. His three weeks at the Point had involved little study, and none that touched on the fine points of warfare with Comanche Indians.

Call went over and sat down by Gus—his friend seemed relaxed, if a little gaunt.

“I seen you in the lightning,” Call said. “I seen he was after you. I shot, but I doubt I hit him. He was after you hard.”

“Yes, and he nearly got me,” Gus said.

“I told you to stay put,” Call reminded him, but in a low voice. He didn’t want the Major to know that Gus had wandered off from his post, although if he hadn’t they might never have known that Buffalo Hump was nearby.

“I didn’t find no gold mine, just a badger and that big Indian,” Gus admitted. “He was just sitting there on a blanket. What was he doing just sitting there with all that lightning striking?”

When Shadrach finished talking to the old Comanche woman, he seemed a little agitated.

“What’s the news, Shad?” Bigfoot asked. He could tell there was some news. Shadrach had his rifle in his hand and he was looking north.

“Bad news,” Shadrach said. “We need to watch our hair for the next few days. If we don’t, we won’t be wearing it.”

“Why, Shad, I always watch my hair,” Bob Bascom said. Ezekiel whooped when he said it, and Josh Corn smiled. The reason for their merriment was that Bob Bascom had almost no hair to watch. He was bald, except for a few sprigs above his ears. Blackie Slidell was almost as bald—he had been heard to remark that any Indian scalping him would be mainly wasting his time.

“Old Buffalo Hump would need a magnifying glass if he was to attempt to scalp either one of us, Bob,” Blackie observed dryly.

“That old woman says a war’s coming,” Shadrach said.

“Well, maybe she is a vision woman,” the Major said. “General Scott has been talking about taking Mexico, I hear.”

“No, not that war,” Shadrach said. “She ain’t talking about no white war. She says the Comanches mean to attack someplace down in Mexico—I guess that would be Chihuahua City.”

“Chihuahua City? Indians?” the Major exclaimed. “It would take a good number of braves to attack a city that size.”

“It might not take that many,” Bigfoot said.

“Why not?” the Major asked.

“Comanches are scary,” Bigfoot said. “One Comanche brave on a lean horse can scare all the white people out of several counties. Fifty Comanches could probably take Mexico City, if they made a good run at it.”

“That old woman ain’t talking about fifty, neither,” Shadrach said. “She’s talking about a passel—hundreds, I reckon.”

“Hundreds?” the Major said, startled. Nobody, as far as he knew, had ever faced a force of hundreds of Comanches. Looking around at his troop—twelve men and one whore—he saw that most of the men were white knuckled with fear as they gripped their rifles. The thought of hundreds of Comanches riding as one force was nothing any commander would care to contemplate.

“That humpbacked man was there alone,” Call said. He rarely spoke unless asked, but this time he thought he ought to remind the Major of what he had seen.

“It felt like fifty or a hundred, though, while he was after me,” Gus said, sitting up.

“You said he was just sitting on a blanket?” Bigfoot asked.

“Yes, just sitting,” Gus said. “He was on a little hill—I guess it was mostly just a hump of sand.”

“Maybe he was waiting for Gomez,” Bigfoot said. “That would explain my dream.”

“No, that’s wild,” Shadrach said. “If he’s got hundreds of warriors coming he wouldn’t need to wait for no Apache.”

“I’ve dreamt prophecy before,” Bigfoot insisted. “I think he was waiting for Gomez. I expect they mean to take Chihuahua City together and divide up the captives.”

“My Lord, if there’s hundreds of them coming, they’ll hunt us up and hack us all down,” Long Bill said. He had been nursing a sense of grievance. After all, he had ridden off from San Antonio to help find a good road west, not to be hacked to pieces by Comanche Indians.

“There wouldn’t need to be hundreds to take us,” Bigfoot corrected. “Twenty-five would be plenty, and ten or fifteen could probably do the job.”

“Now, that’s a useless comment,” Bob Bascom said, hurt by Bigfoot’s low estimation of the troop’s fighting ability.

“I expect we could handle fifteen,” he added.

“Not unless lightning struck half of them,” Bigfoot said. “I was watching you youngsters take target practice yesterday. Half of you couldn’t hit your foot if your gun barrel was resting on it.”

Shadrach conversed a little more with the old woman. When he finished, she began to wail again. The sound was so irritating that Call felt like putting cotton in his ears, but he had no cotton.

“She don’t know nothing about Gomez,” Shadrach said. “I think your dern dream was off.”

“We’ll see,” Bigfoot said. He didn’t press the issue, not with Shadrach, a man who trusted no opinions except his own.

Gus McCrae got to his feet. He wanted to test his leg, in case he had to run again. He walked slowly over and picked up his rifle. His hip didn’t hurt much, but he felt uneasy in his stomach. When the lance stuck in his hip he saw it rather than felt it. He was even able to hold the shaft of the lance off the ground as he ran. Now, even in the midst of his fellow Rangers, the fear he felt then wouldn’t leave him. He had the urge to hide someplace. Gus had never supposed he would run from any man, yet he felt as if he should still be running. He needed to get farther from Buffalo Hump than he was, and as fast as he could. He just didn’t know where to run.

Matilda thought the tall Tennessee boy looked a little green around the gills. Though she was stiff with Gus when he importuned her, she liked the boy, and winced when the lance was being pulled out. He was a lively boy, brash but not really bad. Once or twice she had even extended him credit—he seemed to need it so, and a minute or less did for him, usually. She could occasionally spare a minute for a brash boy with a line of gab.

“Sit down, Gussie,” she said. “You oughtn’t to be exercising too much just yet.”

“Let him exercise, it might keep that leg from stiffening up,” the Major said. “It’s a good thing that wound bled like it did.”

“Yes, good,” Sam said. “Otherwise he be dying soon.”

“Comanches dip their lances in dog shit,” Bigfoot informed them. “You don’t want to get that much dog inside you, if you can help it. Better to bleed it out.”

“Sit down, Gussie,” Matilda said again. “Sit down by me, unless you don’t like me anymore.”

Gus hobbled over and sat down by Matilda. He was a little surprised that she had been so inviting. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her anymore, it was that he liked her too much; for a moment he had an urge to throw himself into Matilda’s lap and cry. Of course, such an action would be the ruin of him, among the hardened Rangers. Rather than cry, he scooted as close to Matilda’s comforting bulk as he could get without actually sitting in her lap. He gulped a time or two, but managed not to break down and sob. He saw old Shadrach mount his horse and ride off into the darkness. Shadrach said not a word, and no one tried to stop him or ask him where he was going.

“Doesn’t he know that big Comanche with the hump is still out there?” Gus asked. He thought the old man must be completely daft, to ride into the darkness with such an Indian near.

Call, too, was shocked by Shadrach’s departure. Buffalo Hump was out there, and even Shadrach would be no match for him. No one Call knew would be a match for him—not alone; Call felt sure of that, although he had only seen the man for a second, in the flash of a lightning strike.

But Shadrach left, with no one offering him a word of caution. Bigfoot didn’t seem to give Shadrach’s departure a second thought, and Major Chevallie merely frowned a little when he saw the mountain man ride away.

“What now, Major?” Ezekiel Moody asked. It was a question everyone would have liked an answer to, but Major Chevallie ignored the question. He said nothing.

Ezekiel looked at Josh Corn, and Josh Corn looked at Rip Green. Long Bill looked at Bob Bascom, who looked at one-eyed Johnny Carthage.

“Now where would Shad be going, this time of night?” Johnny asked. “It’s no time to be exercising your mount—not if it means leaving the troop, not if you ask me.”

“I didn’t hear Shad ask you, Johnny,” Bigfoot said.

“That’s twice today he’s left, though,” the Major said. “It’s vexing.”

Bigfoot walked over to the edge of the camp, lay flat down, and pressed his ear to the ground.

“Is he listening for worms—does he mean to fish?” Gus asked Call, perplexed by Bigfoot’s behavior.

“No, he’s listening for horses—Comanche horses,” Matilda said. “Shut up and let him listen.”

Bigfoot soon stood up and came back to the fire.

“Nobody’s coming right this minute,” he said. “If there were hundreds of horses on the move, I’d hear them.”

“That don’t mean they won’t show up tomorrow, though,” he added.

“Why tomorrow?” several men asked at once. Tomorrow was only an hour or two away.

“Full moon,” Bigfoot said. “It’s what they call the Comanche moon. They like to raid into Mexico, down this old war trail, when the moon is full. They like that old Comanche moon.”

Major Chevallie knew he had only about an hour in which to decide on a course of action. Of course the old woman might be daft; there might be no plan to raid Chihuahua City and no great war party, hundreds of warriors strong, headed down from the Llano Estacado to terrorize the settlements in Mexico and Texas. It might all simply be the ravings of an old woman who was afraid of having her nose cut off.

But if what the old woman said was true, then the settlements needed to be warned. That many warriors moving south would threaten the whole frontier. All the farms west of the Austin–San Antonio line would be vulnerable—even half a dozen warriors split off from the main bunch could burn homesteads, steal children, and generally wreak havoc.

The devil of it was that they were just at the midpoint of their exploration, as far from the settlements to the east as they were from the Pass of the North. Striking on west to El Paso might be the safest option for his troop—the war trail ran well east of El Paso. On the other hand, Buffalo Hump already knew they were there, and knew he was only up against a few men. If he had a large force at his disposal, he might pursue them simply for his pleasure. He no doubt knew that the two scalp hunters were with them. Scalping a scalp hunter was a pursuit that would interest any Indian, Comanche or Apache.

Turning east would mean the end of their mission—and they were only a week or two from completing it—and would also take them directly across the path of the raiders, if there were raiders. They would have to depend on speed and luck, if they turned east.

What was certain was that a decision had to be made, and made soon. He had no shackles on his men—Rangers mostly served because they wanted to; if they stopped wanting to, they might all do what Shadrach had just done. They might just ride off. The youngsters, Call and McCrae, would stay, of course. They were too green to strike out for themselves. But the more experienced men were unlikely to sit around and wait for his decision much past sunup. The sight of the buffalo lance sticking out of Augustus McCrae’s hip was vivid in their minds. They wouldn’t be inclined to play cards, or solicit Matilda, or shoot at cactus pods, not with a big war party swooping down the plains toward them.

The Major sighed. Going to jail in Baltimore was beginning to look like it might have some advantages. He walked over to Bigfoot—the tall scout was idly chewing on a chaparral twig.

“That old woman’s blind,” the Major said. “Do you think she was right about the raiding party? Maybe Shadrach misunderstood her about the figures. Maybe she was talking about some raid that took place thirty years ago.”

Bigfoot spat out the twig. “Maybe,” he said. “But maybe not.”

Bigfoot was thinking about how lucky the two young Rangers were—young Gus particularly. To walk right up on Buffalo Hump and live to tell about it was luck not many men could claim. Even to have seen the humpbacked chief was more than many experienced men could claim. He himself had glimpsed Buffalo Hump once, in a sleet storm near the Clear Fork of the Brazos, several years earlier. He had stepped out of a little post-oak thicket and looked up to see the humpbacked chief aiming an arrow at him. Just as Buffalo Hump loosed the arrow, Bigfoot stepped on an ice-glazed root and lost his footing. The arrow glanced off the bowie knife stuck in his belt. He rolled and brought his rifle up, but by the time he did, the Comanche was gone. That night, afraid to make a fire for fear Buffalo Hump would find him, he almost froze. The large feet that produced his nickname turned as numb as stone.

Now the Major was stumping about, trying to convince himself that Shadrach and the old Comanche woman were wrong about the raiding party. The men were scared, and with good reason; the Major had still not been able to think of an order to give.

“Damn it, I hate to double back,” the Major said. “I was aiming to wet my whistle in El Paso.”

He mounted and walked his sorrel slowly around the camp for a few minutes—the horse was likely to crow-hop on nippy mornings. Shadrach came back while he was riding slowly around. Settling his horse gave the Major time to think, and time, also, to ease his head a little. He was prone to violent headaches, and had suffered one most of the night. But the sun was just rising. It looked to be a fine morning; his spirits improved and he decided to go on west. Turning back didn’t jibe with his ambitions. If he found a clear route to El Paso, he might be made a colonel, or a general even.

“Let’s go, boys—it’s west,” he said, riding back to the campfire. “We were sent to find a road, so let’s go find it.”

The Rangers had survived a terrifying night. As soon as they mounted, warmed by the sun, many of them got sleepy and nodded in their saddles. Gus’s wounded hip was paining him. Walking wasn’t easy, but riding was hard, too. His black nag had a stiff trot. He kept glancing across the sage flats, expecting to see Buffalo Hump rise up from behind a sage bush.

The scalp hunters, Kirker and Glanton, rode half a mile with the troop, and then turned their horses.

“Ain’t you coming, boys?” Long Bill asked.

The scalp hunters didn’t answer. Once the pack mules passed, they rode toward Mexico.

5.

“THERE AIN’T MANY SOLDIERS that know what they’re doing, are there, Shad?” Bigfoot asked. “This major sure don’t.”

“I doubt he’s a major, or even a soldier,” Shadrach said. “I expect he just stole a uniform.”

They were riding west through an area so dry that even the sage had almost played out.

Bigfoot suspected Shadrach was right. Probably Major Chevallie had just stolen a uniform. Texas was the sort of place where people could simply name themselves something and then start being whatever they happened to name. Then they could start acquiring the skills of their new profession—or not acquiring them, as the case might be.

“Well, I ain’t a soldier boy, neither,” Shadrach said.

“Was you ever a soldier?” Bigfoot asked. He was looking up at a crag, or a little hump of mountain, a few miles to the north. In the clear, dry air, he thought he saw a spot of white on the mountain, which was puzzling. What could be white on a mountain far west of the Pecos?

Shadrach ignored Bigfoot’s question—he didn’t answer questions about his past.

“See that white speck, up on that hill?” Bigfoot asked.

Shadrach looked, but saw nothing. Bigfoot was singular for the force of his vision, which was one reason he was sought after as a scout. He was not careful or meticulous—not by Shadrach’s standards—but there was no denying that he could see a long way.

“I swear, I think it’s mountain goat,” Bigfoot said. “I never heard of mountain goat in Texas, but there it is, and it’s white.”

He immediately forgot his vexation with the Major in his excitement at spotting what he was now sure must be a mountain goat—a creature he had heard of but never previously seen.

After a little more looking he thought he spotted a second goat, not far from the first one.

“Look, boys, it’s mountain goats,” he informed the startled Rangers, most of whom were straggling along, half asleep.

At Bigfoot’s cry, excitement instantly flashed through the troop. Rangers with weak vision, such as one-eyed Johnny Carthage or little Rip Green, could barely see the mountain, much less the goats, but that didn’t weaken their excitement. Within a minute the whole troop was racing toward the humpy mountain, where the two goats, invisible to everyone but Bigfoot, were thought to be grazing. Only Matilda and Black Sam resisted the impulse to race wildly off. They continued at a steady pace. The old Comanche woman and the tongueless boy followed on a pack mule.

Gus and Call were racing along with the rest of the troop, their horses running flat out through the thin sage. Gus forgot the throb of his wounded hip in the excitement of the race.

“What do they think they’re going to do, Sam, fly up that mountain?” Matilda asked. From the level plain the sides of the mountain where the goats were seemed far too steep for horses to climb.

Sam was wishing Texas wasn’t so big and open—you could look and look, as far as you could see, and there would be nothing to give you encouragement. He had been in jail for dropping a watermelon, when Bigfoot happened to get locked up. He had picked a watermelon off a stall and thumped it, to see if it was ripe; but then he dropped it and it burst on the cobblestones. The merchant demanded ten cents for his burst melon, but Sam had only three cents. He offered to work off the difference, but the merchant had him arrested instead. The cook in the San Antonio jail got so drunk that he let a wagon run over his foot and crush it, making him too sick to cook. Sam was offered his job and took it—he had known how to cook since he was six. Bigfoot liked the grub so much that he suggested Sam to Major Chevallie, who promptly paid the debt of seven cents and took Sam with him.

Now here he was, in the biggest country he had ever seen, with a horizon so distant that his eyes didn’t want to seek it, and a sun so bright that he could only tolerate it by pulling the brim of his old cap down over his eyes; he was riding along with a whore after a bunch of irritable white men who had decided to chase goats. At least the whore was friendly, even if she did eat snapping turtle for breakfast.

The Rangers, young Gus in the lead, had raced to the foot of the mountain, only to discover at close range what Matilda had discerned at a distance: the little mountain was much too steep for horses, and perhaps even too steep for men. Now that they were directly underneath the crag they couldn’t see the goats, either; they were hidden by rocks and boulders, somewhere above them. Also, their horses were winded from the chase; the mountain that in the clear air had looked so close had actually been several miles away. Many of the horses—skinny nags, mostly—were stumbling and shaking by the time the Rangers dismounted.

Call had never seen a mountain before, although of course he was familiar with hills. This mountain went straight up—if you could get on top of it, you wouldn’t be very far from the sky. But they weren’t at the top of it; they were at the bottom, near several good-sized boulders that had toppled off at some point and rolled out onto the plain.

Major Chevallie, like most of his men, had enjoyed the wild race immensely. After all the worry and indecision it was a relief just to race a horse at top speed over the plain. Besides, if they could bring down a mountain goat or two there would be meat for the pot. He had often hunted in Virginia—deer mostly, bear occasionally, and of course turkeys and geese—but he had never been in sight of a Western mountain goat and was anxious to get in a shot before someone beat him to the game. Several of the men had already grabbed their rifles and were ready to shoot.

Josh Corn got off his horse and vomited, to the general amusement. Josh had a delicate constitution; he could never ride fast for any length of time without losing his breakfast—it was an impediment to what he hoped would be a fine career in the Rangers.

“Boys, let’s climb,” Bigfoot said. “These goats ain’t likely to fall off the hill.”

Long Bill Coleman was the pessimist in the crowd. He was too nearsighted to have seen the goats—in fact, he could not see far up the mountain at all. His horse was in better shape than most because of his lack of confidence in the hunt. He had held the pony to a lope while the others were running flat out. Unlike the rest of the command, Long Bill had not forgotten that there were Comanches in the area. He was more interested in seeing that he had a mount fresh enough to carry him away from Comanches than he was in shooting goats. The latter, in his experience, were hard to chew anyway—worse than hard, if the goat happened to be an old billy.

Matilda and Black Sam came trotting up to the base of the cliff, where the hunting party was assembling itself. The only one to venture up the cliff was young McCrae, who had climbed some thirty yards up when his wounded leg gave out suddenly.

“Look out, he’s falling,” Bob Bascom said.

Call felt embarrassed, for indeed his friend was falling, or rather rolling, down the steep slope he had just climbed up. Gus tried to grab for a little bush to check his descent, but he missed and rolled all the way down, ending up beneath Major Chevallie’s horse, which abruptly began to pitch. The Major had dropped his reins in order to adjust the sights on his rifle. To his intense annoyance, the horse suddenly bolted and went dashing across the plain to the west.

“Now look, you young fool, who told you to climb?” the Major exploded. “Now you’ve run off my horse!”

Gus McCrae was so embarrassed he couldn’t speak. One minute he had been climbing fine, the next minute he was rolling. Call was just as embarrassed. The Major was red in the face with anger. In all likelihood he was about to fire Gus on the spot.

There was a funny side to the spectacle, though—the sight of Gus rolling over and over set many of the Rangers to slapping their thighs and laughing. Matilda was cackling, and even Sam chuckled. Call was on the point of laughing too, but restrained himself out of consideration for his friend. Matilda laughed so loudly that Tom, her horse, usually a stolid animal, began to hop around and act as if he might throw her.

“Dern,” Gus said, so stricken with embarrassment that he could not think of another word to say. Though he had rolled all the way down the hill, his rifle had only rolled partway. It was lodged against a rock, twenty yards above them.

“Get mounted, you damn scamp, and go bring my horse back, before he runs himself out of sight,” the Major commanded. “You can get that rifle when you come back.”

Several Rangers, Ezekiel Moody among them, were watching the horse run off—all of them were in a high state of hilarity. Rip Green was laughing so hard he could scarcely stand up. Everyone except the Major and Gus was enjoying the little moment of comic relief when, suddenly, they saw the Major’s horse go down.

“Prairie-dog hole. I hope his leg’s not broken,” Johnny Carthage said. Before he could even finish saying it the sound of a shot echoed off the mountain behind them.

“No prairie-dog hole, that horse was shot,” Bigfoot said.

Shadrach immediately led his horse behind one of the larger boulders.

“My God, now what?” the Major said. All he had taken off his saddle was the rifle itself—his ammunition and all his kit were with the fallen horse.

No one said a word. The plain before them looked as empty as it had when they had all come racing across it. There was no sign of anyone. Two hawks circled in the sky. The fallen horse did not rise again.

The Rangers, all of them ready to pop off a few shots at some mountain goats, were caught in disarray. Young Josh Corn, having just emptied his stomach, found that he needed to empty his bowels too, and walked down the slope some thirty yards to a little bunch of sage bushes; most of the Rangers had no qualms about answering calls of nature in full view of a crowd, but Josh liked a little privacy. He had just undone his britches when Gus rolled down the hill. But his call was urgent; he was squatting down amid the sage bushes when the Major’s horse bolted. He heard the shot that killed the horse, but supposed it was only some Ranger, popping off a long shot at one of the goats. For a moment his cramping bowels occupied all his attention. Ever since gulping a bellyful of Pecos water he had been afflicted with cramps of such severity that from time to time he was forced to dismount and pour out fluids so alkaline that they turned white in the sun.

Josh kept squatting, emptying himself of more Pecos salts. He was in no rush to get back to the crowd—the cramps were still bad, so bad that he could only have walked bending over, which would have made him an object of derision to his fellows. Besides, he could tell from looking at the cliff that he was too weak to make it up very far. Unless he was lucky, someone else would have to shoot the goats.

Josh had just reached over to strip a few sage leaves to wipe himself with when he saw a movement in the sage some fifteen yards away. All he could see was the back of an animal; he thought it must be a pig, moving through the thickest part of the little patch of sage and chaparral. Josh reached for his pistol. The pig would come in sight in just a moment, and he meant to empty his pistol into it. The other Rangers could go scampering up the mountain to shoot at goats if they wanted to—he would be the one bringing home meat: pig meat. They had feasted on several javelinas on the trip from San Antonio. Some had been tough, others succulent. When there was time Sam liked to bury the whole pig, head, hide, and all, overnight, with coals heaped on it. By morning the pig would be plenty tender; Sam would dig it up and the Rangers would enjoy a fine meal.

Buffalo Hump had been watching the boy. When the young Ranger started to reach for his pistol, Buffalo Hump rose to his knees and fired an arrow just above the tops of the sage: Josh Corn saw him only for a split second before the arrow cut through his throat and severed his windpipe. Josh dropped his pistol and managed to get a hand on the arrow, but he fell sideways as he grasped it and didn’t feel the knife that finished cutting his throat. Buffalo Hump dragged the quivering body behind him as he retreated through the sage. Kicking Wolf had just shot the Major’s horse; all the Rangers were looking across the plain. They had forgotten the boy who was emptying his bowels amid the sage.

Buffalo Hump had his horse staked in a shallow gully. As soon as he got the dead boy into the gully he stripped him, cut off his privates, and threw him on the back of his horse. A curtain of blood from the cut throat covered the boy’s torso. Buffalo Hump mounted, but kept low. He held the streaming corpse across the horse’s rump with one hand. He waited, looking to see if the Rangers were inclined to mount and go investigate the sudden death of the Major’s horse. He had watched the Rangers closely the day of the sandstorm and felt he knew what the capability of the little force was. The only man he had to watch was old Shadrach, known to the Comanches as Tail-of-the-Bear. The long rifle of Tail-of-the-Bear had to be respected. The old man seldom missed. Bigfoot Wallace was quick and strong, but no shot; Buffalo Hump regretted not having killed him the day of the great ice storm on the Clear Fork of the Brazos. The fat Major was a good shot with a pistol, but seldom used the rifle.

Buffalo Hump waited, while the blood from Josh Corn’s corpse ran down his horse’s rear legs and soaked his flanks. In their haste to kill mountain goats—in fact, two Comanche boys with goat skins over their shoulders—the Rangers had foolishly run their horses down. In their eagerness the Rangers had also outrun the old woman and the tongueless boy. He himself had already caught the old woman and notched her nose, to pay back the insult she had given his father. The tongueless boy he had given to Kicking Wolf, who would sell him as a slave. There had been much ammunition on the pack mule, too—the Rangers would soon be out of bullets, if they started shooting. He had slipped into the gully merely to watch the white men at close range, but then the careless young Ranger walked into the sage to empty his bowels. Taking him had been easier than snaring a prairie dog, or killing a turkey.

Once he was satisfied that the whites were not going as a troop to find the killer of the Major’s horse, Buffalo Hump burst out of the gully. He yelled his war cry as loudly as he could and raced directly in front of the whites, still holding the bloody corpse across the rump of his horse. He saw a bullet kick the dust, well short of where he rode. Old Tail-of-the-Bear was shooting low. Even so, Buffalo Hump slid to the off side of his mount, one hand gripping the mane, one leg hooked over the horse. The old man would keep shooting and he might not always shoot low.

Then, in plain sight of the Rangers, Buffalo Hump regained his seat, took the corpse of Josh Corn by one foot, and flung it high in the air. Then he whirled to face the whites for a few seconds, screaming his defiance. When he saw bullets kicking dust at his horse’s feet, he turned and rode slowly out of range.

At the base of the steep mountain, the Rangers were stunned, and in disarray.

“Where’s that old woman?” the Major asked. He remembered suddenly that in their haste to get to the mountain they had run off and left the pack mule that was carrying the old woman and the boy; he remembered, too, that most of their ammunition was on that mule.

The Major looked around and saw that no one had even heard his question. All the Rangers had scrambled to take cover behind the few boulders or the scarce bushes. Gus and Call were huddled behind a rock, but it wasn’t really a boulder and didn’t hide them very well. Both of them looked around for a bigger rock, but all the bigger rocks had Rangers huddled behind them.

The Major himself got behind the other pack mule, the only cover available.

The cry that Buffalo Hump yelled as he raced across the desert was far worse, in Call’s view, than the wailing of the old Comanche woman. Buffalo Hump’s war cry throbbed with hatred, terrible hatred. When the Comanche whirled to face them and flung a naked white body streaked with blood up in the air, both boys were shocked.

“Why, he’s kilt somebody,” Gus said in a shaking tone.

Call was more shocked by how bloody the corpse was. Whoever it was—and he could see that it was a white man—had poured out a terrible lot of blood.

“Where’s young Josh?” Bigfoot asked—he had a bad feeling, suddenly. “I don’t see young Josh anywhere.”

Ezekiel Moody gave a start—he and Josh Corn were best friends. They had joined up with the Rangers on a whim. Zeke looked around at the various Rangers, crouched behind such cover as they could get. He saw no sign of his friend.

“Why, he was right here,” Zeke said, standing up. “I think he just walked off to take a shit—he’s been having the runs.”

“Foolish,” the Major said. He couldn’t spot the boy, either, and got a weak feeling suddenly in his gut.

“He’s been poorly in his belly since he drank that alky water,” Zeke protested. He was sure Josh wasn’t doing anything wrong.

“I wasn’t talking about Josh when I said it was foolish,” the Major said. He had been talking about himself. One glimpse of a mountain goat—Bigfoot’s glimpse at that—had encouraged them to make a wild charge and exhaust their horses. The thought of a hunt had been something to break the monotony of plodding on west. Well, there was no monotony now: the Comanches had really broken it.

Now they were backed against a cliff, his horse was dead, and possibly a boy, too.

“I think that was Josh he pitched up in the air,” Bigfoot said. “I think that sneaking devil caught him.”

“No, it can’t be Josh!” Zeke said, suddenly very distraught. “Josh just went over in them bushes to take a shit.”

“I think he caught him, Zeke,” Bigfoot said, in a kindly tone. He knew the boys were friends.

“Oh no, all that blood,” Zeke said. Before anyone could stop him he jumped on his horse and went riding off toward the spot where Buffalo Hump had thrown the body.

“Hell, where’s that pup going?” Shadrach said. He came walking up, disgusted with himself for having been tricked into such a situation. He hadn’t expected to hit Buffalo Hump when he shot, unless he was lucky, and he didn’t intend to waste any more bullets in the hope of being lucky. He might need every bullet—likely would.

Just as he was walking up to the group, he thought he saw movement—the movement had been an arrow, which thudded into Bigfoot’s horse. The horse squealed and reared. The arrow had come from above—from the mountain.

“They’re above us!” Shadrach yelled. “Get them horses out of range!”

“Oh, damn it, it wasn’t goats, it was Comanches!” Bigfoot said, mortified that he had been so easily taken in. He began to drag his wounded horse farther from the hill. Arrows began to fly off the mountain, though no one could spot the Indians who were shooting them. Several Rangers shot at the mountain, to no effect. Three horses were hit, and one-eyed Johnny Carthage got an arrow in his upper leg. Call had an arrow just glance off his elbow—he knew he was lucky. The horses were in a panic—he had no time to think about anything except hanging on to his mount.

The Rangers all retreated toward the patch of sage bush where Josh Corn had been taken. It was Call, dragging his rearing horse by the bridle, who spotted the bloody patch of ground where Josh had been killed. Call knew it must be Josh’s blood because the shit on the ground was white—his own had mostly been white, since crossing the Pecos.

“Look,” he said to Gus, who was just behind him.

At the sight of all the fresh blood, the strength suddenly drained out of Gus. He dropped to his knees and began to vomit, letting go of his horse’s reins in the process. The horse had an arrow sticking out of its haunch and was jumpy; Call just managed to catch a rein and keep the horse from bolting. Long Bill and Rip Green were shooting at the Comanches on the hill, although they couldn’t see their targets.

“Hold off shooting, you idiots,” Bigfoot yelled. “You ain’t going to hit an Indian a thousand feet up a mountain!”

Bigfoot felt very chagrined. He knew he ought to have been able to tell a goatskin with a Comanche boy under it from a living goat, and he could have if he had just had the patience to ride a little closer and observe the goats as they grazed. His lack of patience had led the Rangers into a trap. Of course, he hadn’t expected the pell-mell rush to shoot goats, but he should have expected it: most Rangers would ride half a day to shoot any game, much less unusual game such as mountain goats.

Now one man was dead, several horses were hurt, a Ranger had an arrow in his leg, Zeke Moody had just foolishly ridden off, and no one had any idea how many Indians they faced. There were several on the mountain and at least two on the plain, one of them Buffalo Hump, no mean opponent. But there could be forty, or even more than forty. In his hurry to get to the mountain he had paid no attention to signs. At least Matilda and Sam had not been cut off. The fact that they had survived probably meant they weren’t dealing with a large party. The loss of the ammunition that was on the other pack mule was a grievous loss, though.

The next worry was Ezekiel Moody, who was still loping off to locate the body of his friend. Bigfoot knew that Zeke would soon be dead or captured, unless he was very lucky.

“Damn that boy, they’ll take him for sure,” the Major said. All the Rangers, plus Matilda and Sam, were huddled in the little patch of sage. Shadrach saw the gully where Buffalo Hump had tethered his horse and found the bloody trail he had made when he dragged Josh Corn’s body. Gus McCrae had the dry heaves. He could not stop retching. The sight of the Indian with the great hump reminded him of his own terrified flight; the smell of Josh Corn’s blood caused his stomach to turn over and over, like a churn. Gus knew that Buffalo Hump had almost caught him—the sight of Josh’s blood-streaked body showed him clearly what his fate would have been had the lance that struck his hip been thrown a little more accurately. A yard or so difference in the footrace, and he would have been as dead as Josh.

Gus finally got to his feet and stumbled a little distance from the blood; he needed to steady himself so he could shoot if the Comanches launched an attack.

Major Chevallie felt that he had decided foolishly—he should have followed his first instinct and headed east. More and more he regretted not taking his chances with the Baltimore judge.

Now he was caught in an exposed place, with only a shallow gully for cover and an unknown number of savages in opposition. Their best hope lay in the skills of the two scouts. Shadrach was calm, if annoyed, and Bigfoot was flustered, no doubt because he knew he was responsible for getting them into such a fix. His superior eyesight had not been superior enough to detect the trick and prevent the race.

The chaos involved in fighting such Indians bothered Randall Chevallie more than anything. In Virginia or even Pennsylvania, if quarrels arose, a man usually knew who he was fighting and how to proceed. But in the West, with a few puny men caught between vast horizons, it was different. The Indians always knew the country better than the white men; they knew how to use it, to hide in it, to survive in it in places where a white man would have no chance. No man in Virginia would ride around with a naked, bloody corpse bouncing around on the rump of his horse. No one in Virginia or Pennsylvania would yell as Buffalo Hump had yelled.

There was another shot from the hidden rifleman on the plain, and Zeke Moody’s horse went down.

“I feared it, they’ll get him now, the young fool,” Bigfoot said.

Zeke was not hurt—he had heard no shot, and supposed his horse had merely stumbled. But the horse didn’t get up—in a moment Zeke realized that the horse was dead. At once he turned, and began to run toward the mountain and the Rangers. But Zeke had scarcely run ten yards before Buffalo Hump loomed behind him, riding a horse whose sides were bloody with Josh Corn’s blood.

“We better go help him,” Call said, but old Shadrach grabbed his arm before he could move.

“All this damn helping’s got to stop,” Shadrach said. “We don’t know how many of them are out there. If we don’t stay together there won’t be a man of us left.”

“There’s no chance for that boy anyway,” the Major said grimly. “I should have shot his horse myself, before he got out of range. That way we could have saved the boy.”

All the Rangers watched the desperate race helplessly. They saw that what the Major said was true. Ezekiel Moody had no chance. Old Shadrach raised his long rifle in case Buffalo Hump strayed in range, but he didn’t expect it, and he didn’t fire.

“I hope he remembers what I told him about killing himself,” Bigfoot said. “He’d be better off to stop running and kill himself. It’d be the easiest thing.”

Ezekiel Moody had the same thought. He was running as fast as his legs could carry him, but when he looked back, he saw that the Indian with the great hump was closing fast. Ezekiel’s heart was beating so hard with fear that he was afraid it might burst. He had just come upon Josh Corn’s body when his horse went down. He had seen the great red cap of blood where Josh’s scalp had been. He had also seen the bloody arrow protruding from Josh’s throat.

Yet he was afraid to stop running and try to kill himself. He was afraid the Comanche would be on him before he could even get his pistol out. Also, he was getting close enough to the Rangers that one of them might make a lucky shot and hit Buffalo Hump, or turn him. Old Shadrach had been known to make some remarkable shots—maybe if he just kept running one of the Rangers would get off a good long shot.

Then abruptly Zeke changed his mind and gave up. He stopped and tried to yank out his pistol and shove it against his eyeball, as Bigfoot had instructed. He knew the Indian on the bloody horse was almost on him—he knew he had to be quick.

But when he got his pistol out, he turned to glance at the charging Indian, and the pistol dropped out of his sweaty hand. Before he could stoop for it the horse and the Indian were there: he had failed; he was caught.

Buffalo Hump reached down and grabbed the terrified boy by his long black hair. He yanked his horse to a stop, lifted Zeke Moody off his feet, and slashed at his head with a knife, just above the boy’s ears. Then he whirled and raced across the front of the huddled Rangers, dragging Zeke by the hair. As the horse increased its speed, the scalp tore loose and Zeke fell free. Buffalo Hump had whirled again, and held aloft the bloody scalp. Then he turned and rode away slowly, at a walk, to show his contempt for the marksmanship of the Rangers. The bloody scalp he still held high.

Ezekiel Moody stumbled through the sage and cactus, screaming from the pain of his ripped scalp. So much blood streamed over his eyes that he couldn’t see. He wanted to go back and find his pistol, so he could finish killing himself, but Buffalo Hump had dragged him far from where he had dropped the pistol. He could scarcely see, for blood. Zeke was in too much pain to retrace his steps. All he could do was stumble along, screaming in pain at almost every step.

Shadrach sighted on the Comanche with the big hump, as Buffalo Hump rode away. Then he raised his barrel a bit before he fired. It was an old buffalo hunter’s trick, but it didn’t work. Buffalo Hump was out of range, and Zeke Moody was scalped and screaming from pain.

“Ain’t nobody going to go get Zeke?” Matilda asked. The boy’s screams affected her—she had begun to cry. In peaceful times, back in San Antonio, Zeke had sometimes sat and played the harmonica to her.

“Somebody needs to help that boy, he’s bad hurt,” she said.

“Matilda, he’ll find his way here—once he gets a little closer we’ll go carry him in,” the Major said. “He oughtn’t to have left the troop—if young Corn hadn’t, he might be alive.”

The Major was a good deal annoyed by the predicament he found himself in. The scalp hunters had defected, the two captives were lost, one young Ranger was dead, and another disabled; Johnny Carthage had an arrow in his leg that so far nobody had been able to pull out; besides that they had lost two horses, one pack mule, and most of their ammunition. It seemed to him a dismal turn of events. He still had no idea how large a force he faced—the only Indian to show himself was the chief, Buffalo Hump, who had spent the morning having bloody sport at their expense.

“Well, this is merry,” Bigfoot said. “We’ve been running around like chickens, and Buffalo Hump has been cutting our heads off.”

“Now, he didn’t cut Zeke’s head off, just his hair,” Bob Bascom corrected. He was of a practical bent and did not approve of inaccurate statements, however amusing they might be.

“Zeke will have to keep his hat on this winter, I expect,” Bigfoot said. “He’s gonna scare the women, now that he’s been scalped.”

“He don’t scare me, he’s just a boy,” Matilda said. She was disgusted with the inaction of the men—so disgusted that she started walking out to help Zeke herself.

“Hold up, Matty, we don’t need you getting killed too,” the Major said.

Matilda ignored him. She had never liked fat officers, and this one was so fat he had difficulty getting his prod out from under his belly when he visited her. In any case, she had never allowed soldiers, fat or otherwise, to give her orders.

Call and Gus knelt together, keeping a tight hold on the bridle reins of their two horses. Both of them could see Zeke, whose whole face and body were red.

“I expect he’ll die from that scalping,” Call said.

“I didn’t know people had that much blood in them,” Gus said. “I thought we was mostly bone inside.”

Call didn’t admit it, but he had the same belief; but from what he had seen that morning, it seemed that people were really just sacks of blood with legs and arms stuck on them.

“Keep close to me,” Gus said. “There might be some more of them sneaking devils around here close.”

“I am close to you,” Call said, still thinking about the blood. Now and again, working for the old blacksmith, he had cut himself, sometimes deeply, on a saw blade or a knife. But what he had seen in the last few minutes was different. The ground where Josh had been killed was soaked, as if from a red rain. It reminded him of the area behind the butcher stall in San Antonio, where beeves and goats were killed and hung up to drain.

Now there was Zeke, a healthy man only a few minutes ago, staggering around with his scalp torn off. Call knew that if Buffalo Hump had been a few steps faster when he was chasing Gus, Gus would look like Josh or Zeke.

In San Antonio every man on the street, whether they were famous Indian fighters like Bigfoot, or just farmers in for supplies, told stories of Indian brutalities—Call had long known in his head that Indian fighting on the raw frontier between the Brazos and the Pecos was bloody and violent. But hearing about it and seeing it were different things. Rangering was supposed to be adventure, but this was not just adventure. This was struggle and death, both violent. Hearing about it and seeing it happen were different things.

“We’ll have to be watching every minute now,” Gus said. “We can’t just lope off anymore, looking for pigs to shoot. We have to be watching. These Indians are too good at hiding.”

Call knew it was true. He had glanced over at Josh Corn just as Josh was taking his pants down to shit, and had seen nothing at all that looked worrisome—just a few sage bushes. And yet the same humpbacked Indian who had chased Gus and nearly caught him had been hiding there. Not only that, he had managed to kill Josh and mutilate him without making a sound, with all the Rangers and Matilda just a few yards away.

Until that morning Call had never really felt himself to be in danger—not even when he had sat around the campfire and listened to the tortured Mexican scream. The Mexican had been a lone man, whereas they were a Ranger troop. Nobody was going to come into camp and bother them.

Now it had happened, though—an Indian had come within rock-throwing distance and killed Josh Corn. The same Indian had caught Zeke and scalped him, as quick as Sam, the cook, could wring a chicken’s neck.

Gus McCrae wished that his churning stomach would just settle. He wasn’t confident of his shooting, anyway—not beyond a certain distance—and he felt he was in a situation that might require him to shoot well, something that would not be easy, not with his stomach heaving and jerking. He wanted to be steady, but he wasn’t.

Another thing that had begun to weigh on Gus’s mind was that so far he had actually only been able to spot one Indian: Buffalo Hump. When he looked up on the mountain, he couldn’t see the Indians who had shot the arrows down on them, and when he looked across the plain he couldn’t see the Indian or Indians who had shot the Major’s horse, and then Ezekiel’s, too.

For no reason, just as Gus was feeling as if he might have to dry heave a little bit more, he remembered the conversation Shadrach had had with the Major about the hundreds of Indians that might be coming down to attack Mexico. The thought of hundreds of Comanches, now that he had seen firsthand what one or two could do, was hard to get comfortable with. Their little troop was already down to ten men, assuming that Zeke died of the scalping. It wouldn’t take hundreds of Indians to wipe them out completely. It would only take three or four Indians—maybe less. Buffalo Hump might accomplish it by himself, if he kept at it.

“How many of them do you think are out there?” he asked Call, who was squeezing the barrel of his rifle so tightly it seemed as if he might be going to squeeze the barrel shut.

Call was having the same thoughts as his friend. If there were many Comanches out there, they would be lucky if any of the Rangers survived.

“I ain’t seen but one—him,” Call said. “There must be more, though. Somebody shot those horses.”

“That ain’t hard shooting,” Gus said. “Anybody can hit a horse.”

“They shot them while they were running and killed both of them dead,” Call said. “Who says that’s easy? Neither of them horses ever moved.”

“I expect there’s a passel of killers up on that mountain,” Gus said. “They shot a lot of arrows down on us. You’d think they’d have shot at Matilda. She’s the biggest target.”

To Call’s mind the remark was an example of his friend’s impractical thinking. Matilda Roberts wasn’t even armed. A sensible fighter would try to disable the armed men first, and then worry about the whores.

“The ones they ought to try for are Shadrach and Bigfoot,” Call said. “They’re the best fighters.”

“I aim to give them a good fight, if I can ever spot them,” Gus said, wondering if he could make true on his remark. His stomach was still pretty unsteady.

“I doubt there’s more than five or six of them out there,” he added, mostly in order to be talking. When he stopped talking he soon fell prey to unpleasant thoughts, such as how it would feel to be scalped, like Zeke was.

“How would you know there’s only five or six?” Call asked. “There could be a bunch of them down in some gully, and we’d never see them.”

“If there was a big bunch I expect they’d just come on and kill us,” Gus said.

“Matilda’s about got Zeke,” Call said.

When Matilda finally reached the injured boy, he had dropped to his knees and was scrabbling around in the dust, trying to locate his dropped pistol.

“Here, Zeke—I’m here,” Matilda said. “I’ve come to take you back to camp.”

“No, I have to find my gun,” Zeke said—he was startled that Matilda had come for him.

“I got to find it because that big one might come back,” he added. “I’ve got to do what Bigfoot said—poke the gun in my eyeball and shoot, before he comes back.”

“He won’t come back, Zeke,” Matilda said, trying to lift the wounded boy to his feet. “He’d have taken you with him, if he wanted you.” The sight of the boy’s head made her gag for a moment. She had seen several men shot or knifed in fights, but she had never had to look at a wound as bad as Zeke Moody’s head. His face seemed to have dropped, too—his scalp must have been what held it up.

“Come on, let’s go,” Matilda said, trying again to lift him up.

“Let me be, just help me find my pistol,” Zeke said. “I oughtn’t to have run. I ought to have just killed myself, like Bigfoot said. I ought to have just stopped and done it.”

Matilda caught Zeke under the arms and pulled him up. Once she had him on his feet, he walked fairly well.

“There ain’t no pistol, Zeke,” she said. “We’ll just get back with the boys. You ain’t dying, either. You just got your head skinned.”

“No, I can’t stand it, Matty,” Zeke said. “It’s like my head’s on fire. Just shoot me, Matty. Just shoot me.”

Matilda ignored the boy’s whimperings and pleadings and half walked, half dragged him back toward the troop. When they were about fifty yards from camp young Call came out to help her. He was a willing worker, who had several times helped her with small chores. When he saw Ezekiel Moody’s head, he went white. Gus McCrae came up to assist, and just as he arrived, Zeke passed out, from pain and shock. Bringing him in went easier once they didn’t have to listen to his moans and sobs. All three of them were soon covered with his blood, but they got him into camp and laid him down near Sam, who would have to do whatever doctoring could be done.

“God amighty!” Long Bill said, when he saw the red smear of Ezekiel’s head.

Johnny Carthage began to puke, while Bob Bascom walked away on shaky legs. Major Chevallie took one look at the boy’s head and turned away.

Bigfoot and Shadrach exchanged looks. They both wished the boy had gone on and killed himself. If any of them were to survive, they would need to move fast and move quietly, hard things to manage if you were packing a scalped man.

Sam squatted down by the boy and swabbed a little of the blood away with a piece of sacking. They had no water to spare—it would take a bucketful to wash such a wound effectively, and they didn’t have a bucketful to spare.

“We need to give him a hat,” Sam said. “Otherwise the flies will be gettin’ on this wound.”

“How long will it take him to scab over?” the Major asked.

Sam looked at the wound again and swabbed off a little more blood.

“Four or five days—he may die first,” Sam said.

Shadrach looked across the desert, trying to get some sense of where the Comanches were, and how many they faced. He thought there were three on the mountain, and probably at least three somewhere on the plain. He didn’t think the same warrior killed both horses. He knew there could well be more Indians, though. A little spur of the mountain jutted out to the south, high enough to conceal a considerable party. If they were lucky, there were no more than seven or eight warriors—about the normal size for a Comanche raiding party. If there were many more than that, the Comanches would probably have overrun them when they were strung out in their race to the mountain. At that point they could have been easily divided and picked off.

“I doubt there’s more than ten,” Bigfoot said. “If there was a big bunch of them our horses would smell their horses—they’d be kicking up dust and snorting.”

“They don’t need more than ten,” Shadrach said. “That humpback’s with ’em.”

Bigfoot didn’t answer. He felt he could survive in the wilds as well as the next man, and there was no man he feared; but there were quite a few he respected enough to be cautious of, and Buffalo Hump was certainly one of those. He considered himself a superior plainsman; there wasn’t much country between the Sabine and the Pecos that he didn’t know well, and he had roved north as far as the Arkansas. He thought he knew the country well, and yet he hadn’t spotted the gully where Buffalo Hump hid his horse, before he killed Josh Corn. Nor had he ever seen, or expected to see, a man scalped while he was still alive, though he had heard of one or two incidents of men who had been scalped and lived to tell the tale. In the wilds there were always surprises, always things to learn that you didn’t know.

Major Chevallie was nervously watching the scouts. He himself had a pounding headache, and a fever to boot. The army life disagreed with his constitution, and being harassed by Comanche Indians disagreed with it even more. Half his troop were either puking or walking unsteady on their feet, whether from fear or bad water he didn’t know. While he was pondering his next move he saw Matilda walking back out into the sage bushes, as unconcerned as if she were walking a street in San Antonio.

“Here, Matilda, you can’t just wander off—we’re not on a boulevard,” he said.

“I’m going to get Josh,” Matilda said. “I don’t intend to just leave him there, for the varmints to eat. If somebody will dig a grave while I’m gone I’ll bring Josh back and put him in it.”

Before she had gone twenty yards the Indians appeared from behind the jutting spur of mountain. There were nine in all, and Buffalo Hump was in the lead.

Major Chevallie wished for his binoculars, but his binoculars were on the horse that had been killed.

Several of the Rangers raised their rifles when the Indians came in sight, but Bigfoot yelled at them to hold their fire.

“You couldn’t hit the dern hill at that distance, much less the Indians,” he said. “Besides, they’re leaving.”

Sure enough the little group of Indians, led by Buffalo Hump, walked their horses slowly past the front of the Rangers’ position. They were going east, but they were in no hurry. They rode slowly, in the direction of the Pecos. Matilda was more than one hundred yards from camp by that time, looking for Josh Corn’s body, but she didn’t look at the Indians and they didn’t look at her.

Call and Gus stood together, watching. They had never before seen a party of Indians on the move. Of course, in San Antonio there were a few town Indians, drunk most of the time. Now and then they saw an Indian of a different type, one who looked capable of wild behavior.

But even those unruly ones were nothing like what Call and Gus were watching now: a party of fighting Comanches, riding at ease through the country that was theirs. These Comanches were different from any men either of the young Rangers had ever seen. They were wild men, and yet skilled. Buffalo Hump had held a corpse on the back of his racing pony with one hand. He had scalped Zeke Moody without even getting off his horse. They were wild Indians, and it was their land they were riding through. Their rules were not white rules, and their thinking was not white thinking. Just watching them ride away affected young Gus and young Call powerfully. Neither of them spoke until the Comanches were almost out of sight.

“I’m glad there was just a few of them,” Gus said, finally. “I doubt we could whip ’em if there were many more.”

“We can’t whip ’em,” Call said.

Just as he said it, Buffalo Hump stopped, raised the two scalps high once again, and yelled his war cry, which echoed off the hill behind the Rangers.

Gus, Call, and most of the Rangers raised their guns, and some fired, although the Comanche chief was far out of range.

“If we was in a fight and it was live or die, I expect we could whip ’em,” Gus said. “If it was live or die I wouldn’t be for dying.”

“If it was live or die, we’d die,” Call said. What he had seen that morning had stripped him of any confidence he had once had in the Rangers as a fighting force. Perhaps their troop could fight well enough against Mexicans or against white men. But what he had seen of Comanche warfare—and all he had seen, other than the scalping of Zeke Moody, was a brief, lightning-lit glimpse of Buffalo Hump throwing his lance—convinced him not merely in his head but in his gut and even in his bones that they would not have survived a real attack. Bigfoot and Shadrach might have been plainsmen enough to escape, but the rest of them would have died.

“Any three of them could finish us,” Call said. “That one with the hump could probably do it all by himself, if he had taken a notion to.”

Gus McCrae didn’t answer. He was scared, and didn’t like the fact one bit. It wasn’t just that he was scared at the moment, it was that he didn’t know that he would ever be anything but scared again. He felt the need to move his bowels—he had been feeling the need for some time—but he was afraid to go. He didn’t want to move more than two or three steps from Call. Josh Corn had just gone a few steps—very few—and now Buffalo Hump was waving his scalp in the air. He was waving Ezekiel’s too, and all Zeke had done was ride a short distance out of camp. Gus was standing almost where Josh had been taken, too. Looking around, he couldn’t see how even a lizard could hide, much less an Indian, and yet Buffalo Hump had hidden there.

Gus suddenly realized, to his embarrassment, that his knees were knocking. He heard an unusual sound and took a moment or two to figure out that it was the sound of his own knees knocking together. His knees had never done that in his life—they had never even come close. He looked around, hoping no one had noticed, and no one had. The men were all still watching the Comanches. The men were all scared: he could see it. Maybe old Shadrach wasn’t, and maybe Bigfoot wasn’t, but the rest of them were mostly as shaky as he was. Matilda wasn’t, either—she was walking back, the body of Josh Corn in her arms.

Gus looked at Call, a man his own age. Call should be shaking, just as he was, but Call was just watching the Indians. He may not have been happy with the situation, but he wasn’t shaking. He was looking at the Comanches steadily. He had his gun ready, but mainly he just seemed to be studying the Indians.

“I don’t like ’em,” Gus said, vehemently. He didn’t like it that there were men who could scare him so badly that he was even afraid to take a shit.

“I wish we had a cannon,” he said. “I guess they’d leave us alone if we was better armed.”

“We are better armed than they are,” Call said. “He killed Josh with an arrow and scalped Zeke with a knife. They shot arrows down on us from that hill. If they’d shot rifles I guess they would have killed most of us.”

“They have at least one gun, though,” Gus then pointed out. “They shot them horses.”

“It wouldn’t matter if we had ten cannons,” Call said. “We couldn’t even see ’em—how could we hit them? I doubt they’d just stand there watching while we loaded up a cannon and shot at them. They could be halfway to Mexico while we were doing that.”

The Comanches were just specks in the distance by then.

“I have never seen no people like them,” Call said. “I didn’t know what wild Indians were like.

“Those are Comanches,” he added.

Gus didn’t know what his friend meant. Of course they were Comanches. He didn’t know what answer to make, so he said nothing.

Once Buffalo Hump and his men were out of sight, the troop relaxed a little—just as they did, a gun went off.

“Oh God, he done for himself!” Rip Green said.

Zeke Moody had managed to slip Rip’s pistol out of its holster—then he shot himself. The shot splattered Rip’s pants leg with blood.

“Oh God, now look,” Rip said. He stooped and tried to wipe the blood off his pants leg with a handful of sand.

Major Chevallie felt relieved. Travel with the scalped boy would have been slow, and in all likelihood he would have died of infection anyway. Johnny Carthage would be lucky to escape infection himself—Sam had had to cut clean to the bone to get the arrow out. Johnny had yelped loudly while Sam was doing the cutting, but Sam bound the wound well and now Johnny was helping Long Bill scoop out a shallow grave for young Josh.

“Now you’ll have to dig another,” the Major informed them.

“Why, they were friends—let ’em bunk together in the hereafter,” Bigfoot said. “It’s too rocky out here to be digging many graves.”

“It’s not many—just two,” the Major said, and he stuck to his point. The least a fallen warrior deserved, in his view, was a grave to himself.

When Matilda saw what Zeke had done, she cried. She almost dropped Josh’s body, her big shoulders shook so.

“Matty’s stout,” Shadrach said, in admiration. “She carried that body nearly five hundred yards.”

Matilda sobbed throughout the burying and the little ceremony, which consisted of the Major reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Both boys had visited her several times—she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn’t last long, once they became men. Both of them, in her view, deserved better than a shallow grave by a hill beyond the Pecos, a grave that the varmints would not long respect.

“Do you think Buffalo Hump left?” the Major asked Bigfoot. “Or is he just toying with us?”

“They’re gone for now,” Bigfoot said. “I don’t expect they’ll interfere with us again, not unless we’re foolish.”

“Maybe the scalp hunters will kill them,” Long Bill suggested. “Killing Indians is scalp hunters’ work. Kirker and Glanton ought to get busy and do it.”

“I expect we’d best turn back,” the Major said. “We’ve lost two men, two horses, and that mule.”

“And the ammunition,” Shadrach reminded him.

“Yes, I ought to have transferred it,” the Major admitted.

He sighed, looking west. “I guess we’ll have to mark this road another time,” he said, in a tone of regret.

The scouts did not comment.

“Hurrah, we’re going back,” Gus said to Call once the news was announced.

“If they let us, we are,” Call said. He was looking across the plain where the Comanches had gone, thinking about Buffalo Hump.

The land before him, which looked so empty, wasn’t. A people were there who knew the emptiness better than he did; they knew it even better than Bigfoot or Shadrach. They knew it and they claimed it. They were the people of the emptiness.

“I’m glad I seen them,” Call said.

“I ain’t,” Gus said. “Zeke and Josh are dead, and I nearly was.”

“I’m still glad I seen them,” Call said.

That day at dusk, as the troop was making a wary passage eastward, they found the old Comanche woman, wandering in the sage. A notch had been cut in her right nostril.

Of the tongueless boy there was no sign. When they asked the old woman what became of him she wailed and pointed north, toward the llano. Black Sam helped her up behind him on his mule, and they rode on, slowly, toward the Pecos.