More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“I will kill him, when he needs to be killed,” Buffalo Hump told them. He didn’t like Blue Duck much, but he didn’t kill him, or send him away. He delayed, hoping the boy would change with age.
Buffalo Hump knew, and the elders knew as well, that they could not simply scare the whites away by tortures and killings, or by taking a few captives now and then. There were too many Texans—too many. The very thought of them made him weary and sad.
Deets was a young black man, making his second trip with the troop. He had been found sleeping in the stables one morning, covered with dust and hay. He had escaped from a large group of stolen slaves who were being driven into Mexico
Once you start tupping with slavering sluts like her, there’s no recovery: just look at me! I ought to be secretary of war, if not president, but I’m doing nothing better than chasing heathen red men on this goddamn dusty frontier, and all because of a lustful rich slut from Birmingham! Bible and sword!”
it was only later, once Felice had begun to fill out as a woman, that the Missus had begun to beat her hard.
Jake Spoon, not yet eighteen, with his dimples and curls,
“The theory is that the Forty-niners spread it among the red men, as they were running out to California to look for gold,” he added.
But they’ve brought the pox to the prairies, I guess.
Once the pox gets among them they’ll die off so quick we’ll probably have to disband the rangers. There’ll be no healthy Indians left to fight.”
“The tragedy of man is not death or epidemic or lust or rage or fitful jealousy,” he said loudly—his voice tended to rise while declaiming unpleasant facts. “No sir, the tragedy of man is boredom, sir—boredom!” the Captain said. “A man can only do a given thing so many times with freshness and spirit—then, no matter what it is, it becomes like an office task. I enjoy cards and whoring, but even cards and whoring can grow boresome. You tup your wife a thousand times and that becomes an office task, too.”
For ten years, at guard posts all over the Texas frontier, he had listened to Augustus talk about Clara Forsythe.
The truth was he’d rather be right where he was, sitting on a canyon’s rim, looking down on the campfires of the last wild, dangerous Indians in Texas,
That was the way it was, and that was the way it would stay, at least until the Indians camped below them had been whipped and scattered, so that they could no longer raid, burn farms, take white children captive, and scare back settlement on the southern edge of the plains.
“I’ll take Buffalo Hump over your diplomatic Indians,” he said. “Buffalo Hump don’t parley—don’t believe in it. He knows the white man’s promises are worth no more than Slow Tree’s. They’re worth nothing, and he knows it. He scorns our parleying and peace-piping and the lot. I admire him for it, though I’d kill him in a second if I could get him in range.”
since the white men were there in his land, his country, he meant to live off their animals: their horses, their pigs, and particularly their cattle. The land along the Nueces boiled with cattle.
And yet she did what she did with men, with only the sadness in her eyes to tell of it, though that sadness told of it eloquently, at least to Clara.
Buffalo Hump was amused. The Kickapoo was an eccentric person who was apt to turn up anywhere on the llano on some outlandish errand that no other Indian would bother about.
Most people thought Famous Shoes was crazy, but Buffalo Hump didn’t. Though a Kickapoo, the man had respect for the old ways. He behaved like the old ones behaved; the old ones, too, would go to any lengths to learn some useful fact about the animals or the birds.
He wanted to steal the horses that the Texans would miss most.
What Tana wanted was to stay behind with the white woman and torture her to death, as vengeance against the whites who had killed his father.
That night the white soldiers tormented him with hot bayonets and in the morning they hung him, not with a rope but with a fine chain, so that he was a long time dying. Then, because Black Hand had been the most important chief to attend the parley, the whites cut off his head and kept it in a sack. They said they would return the head only when all the remaining white captives had been returned to Austin.
The few captives held by the tribes at that time were immediately tortured to death.
“If I were to break my whiskey jug I expect I could glue it so it would look like a fine jug,” Augustus replied. “But it would still be leaky and let the whiskey run out. That’s the way it is with her, Woodrow. They might get her back in church and sing hymns at her till she stops screaming them screams. But she’ll always be leaky. She won’t never be right.”
What rested him, after a day of contending with the circumstances of travel—the girth on the pack mule might break, or they might strike a creek that looked dangerous to cross—was to be by himself, a hundred yards or so from camp.
“They’re quite a couple, the Sculls. A Yankee snob and a Southern slut. They’re hell to manage, both of them.”
What Buffalo Hump wanted was a great raid—a great raid, such as there had been in the past, when warriors went into even the largest towns and stole captives, or burned buildings, or ran off all the horses and livestock that they wanted.
Never before had the Comanches made a raid in the coldest month of the winter. Whites and Mexicans both—but particularly Mexicans—had come to fear the fall, when the great yellow harvest moon shone. Along the old war trail the moon of the fall was called the “Comanche moon”; for longer than anyone could remember it had been under the generous light of the fall moon that the Comanches had struck deep into Mexico, to kill and loot and bring back captives.
Always, too, their guns improved. They had rifles now that could spit many bullets and strike warriors fatally at ranges well beyond that of any arrow.
Six hundred braves rode out of the canyon behind him,
“I’ve been telling you what I needed for ten years—if you’d wanted me enough to quit the rangers you would have quit long ago.
The hope of someday marrying Clara had been the deepest hope of his life. What would his life be, with that hope lost?
Clara said. “My hope is that you’ll visit, in about ten years.” “Visit you once you’re married—now why would you want that?” Augustus asked, startled by the remark. “Because I’d want you to know my children,” Clara said. “I’d want them to have your friendship.”
He didn’t at first understand what Maggie had just said to him. She had said something about a child, but his mind was on his meeting with the Governor
The part about the baby hardly registered with him until he saw the look in her eyes. The look in her eyes was desperate.
“But they were rude. I won’t tolerate rude behavior.”
He knew it might be his last chance to beat back the white man, to cleanse the land of them and make it possible for the Comanche people to live as they had always lived, masters of the llano and all the prairies where they had always hunted.
He wanted the warriors who rode with him to fight as Comanches had always fought, with the bow and the lance—and
Without risk there was no power, not for a grown man. That was why Kicking Wolf was taking the Buffalo Horse to Ahumado—if
Kicking Wolf’s daring theft had freed him of a command he was tired of, presenting him with a fine opportunity for pure adventure—solitary adventure, the kind he liked best. He could match his skill against an unforgiving country and an even more unforgiving foe. That was why he had come west in the first place: adventure. The task of harassing the last savages until they were exterminated was adventure diluted with policy and duty.
“To help us eat your horse,” Ahumado informed him. “That’s what we are cooking, over there in our pit.”
They had not even come upon a farm for over a week.
While on patrol he liked to give his full attention to the landscape, the men, the horses, tracks, sign, the behavior of the birds and animals they spotted, anything that might help keep a troop of men alive in a country where a Comanche raiding party could swoop down on them at any moment.
her new conquest, Major Nettleson. Long Bill’s death was as much a shock as Clara’s marriage. It left him indifferent to everything. Why was he there? What did he care about rangering now? He’d never stroll the streets of Austin again, either with the woman or the friend; at the thought, such a hopeless sadness took him that he turned and walked out the door,
“Is Lonesome Dove a place?” Call asked. “I confess I’m not familiar with it.”
Captain McCrae here has mistook our blue sow for a shark.” “Sow . . . what sow?” Gus asked, annoyed by the man’s jocular tone.
“Captain King expects there’ll be businesses here someday, because of the fine river crossing,” Gus said. “If there’s businesses here, I guess we could have one too.” “Speak for yourself,” Call said. “I’m a Texas Ranger and I aim to stay one.”
The army will whip out the Indians in a few more years and there won’t be much to do, anyway.”
Though they quarreled frequently, they were often tugged by the same impulses, and so it was at that moment by the slow river. The longer they looked across it, the more strongly they felt the urge to attempt their mission alone—without cattle and without the other men. “We could just do it,
arrive at the moment of surrender. Some came to it quickly, after only a short sharp agony; others held to their lives far longer than was seemly. But finally they gave up. He had seen it, on the battlefield, in hospital, in the cold toils of marriage or the great houses of commerce; finally men gave up. He thought he would never have to learn resignation, but that was hubris. It was time to give up, to stop fighting, to wait for death to ease in.
The Apache said that Big Horse Scull was insane; he jumped around like a flea. The Apache mentioned that Ahumado had cut off Scull’s eyelids, which was what had made him insane.
