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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.
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.
Once the pack mules passed, they rode toward Mexico.
“I have never seen no people like them,” Call said. “I didn’t know what wild Indians were like. “Those are Comanches,” he added.
Part II
“Let’s ride, boys,” Long Bill said. “Austin’s a far piece up the road.” “We’ll ride, but I ain’t a boy,” Matilda said, as they rode out of San Antonio.
That Matilda! What do you do with her?
Call liked to listen to Long Bill play the harmonica. The old tune, clear and plaintive, made a sadness come in him. He didn’t know why the music made him sad—or even what the sadness was for. After all, as the young woman said, they were all still alive, and not much worse off than they had been before the cyclone struck. The loss of the horses was a nuisance, of course, but it wasn’t because of the horses that he felt sad. He felt sad for all of them: the Rangers, Matilda, the little family that had lost its roof. They were small, and the world was large and violent. They were alive and, for
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Johnny Carthage was waiting when Call came out. He had a policy of not buying Mexican women, the reason being that a Mexican whore had stabbed out his eye while trying to rob him.
“It might if I rubbed it on myself,” Clara said. Call was plain embarrassed. He had never heard of a woman rubbing liniment on a man’s foot. It seemed improper to him, although he recognized that standards might be different in Austin.
“You just buy the whiskey,” he instructed. “I’ll do the getting drunk.”
“There’s only one way to catch an Indian, which is to wait for him to stop,” Bigfoot said. “Once they get across the Brazos they’ll feel a little safer. They might stop.” “And then we’ll kill them?” Call said—he thought he understood now. “Then we’ll try,” Bigfoot said.
A woman that catches snapping turtles for breakfast is a woman to avoid, if you ask me.”
“Why would it be different?” Call asked, wishing he could have understood the Indian’s talk. “Different because you killed his son,” the Pawnee said.
Though he didn’t much like Falconer, the man’s words filled him with relief. He felt he had caught up with Call again, in terms of rank. He also felt that he was staunch again, and could fight when a fight was required. The weak feeling that had troubled him since his first glimpse of Buffalo Hump wasn’t there anymore—or at least, not there steadily. He might die, but at least he could fight first, and not simply pass his days shaking at the expectation of slaughter.
Four horses were moving across the ridge—Buffalo Hump was coming with his wives. “Here he comes, right on time,” Caleb said. “I’ll make a short speech. He’s a murdering devil but I invited him to supper and I won’t have no guest of mine interfered with.”
“If we kill him, the Comanche and the Kiowa will rise up and wipe out every damn farm between the Brazos and the Nueces,” Caleb said. “We have to cross his country to reach Santa Fe, and we don’t know much about it. If it turns out that we have to fight him, we’ll fight him, but right now I’d like to see some manners in this camp.”
“Yes, he wants her for a wife,” Bes-Das said. “He has seen her before. He calls her Turtle Catching Woman.”
“Tell the great chief that Matilda is the wife of Tail-of-the-Bear,” Caleb said. “She ain’t available for marriage unless she gets divorced.”
“He says Tail-of-the-Bear is too old for such a large woman,” Bes-Das said. “He says he will give him a young horse, in exchange.”
“Tell him we can’t accept—it is not our custom to trade people for horses,” Caleb said.
In a motion no one saw clearly, Caleb Cobb drew his pistol and fired point-blank at Captain Falconer. The bullet took him in the forehead, directly above his nose. “You’re resigned, Captain,” Caleb said. He walked over to the baggage wagon containing the officer’s baggage and came back with the cherry-wood case containing the dead man’s Holland and Holland rifle. The body of Billy Falconer lay not two feet from the edge of Buffalo Hump’s robe. Neither the war chief nor his women gave any sign that they had noticed the killing. Caleb Cobb opened the gun case and handed it to Buffalo Hump. The
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If Caleb had put it to him that he viewed the matter as serious—that it meant life or death—no doubt Captain Falconer would have given up the gun. But Caleb hadn’t given a chance to argue. Call would have thought there would have to be some kind of trial, before a captain in the Rangers could be executed. He meant to ask Bigfoot about the matter the next time he saw him.
“What happens in an army if the colonel goes crazy?” Call asked. It seemed to him that Caleb Cobb might be insane. His own promotion, for doing nothing more than defending himself from sure death, had been a whimsy on Caleb’s part—as much a whimsy as Falconer’s execution. During the long rainy nights, huddled around campfires, their pants soaked, the men speculated and speculated about Caleb Cobb’s surprising action.
“I need those blankets, Sam—don’t tell,” Matilda said. She was fond of Sam too, though in a different way. “I won’t, Miss Matty,” Sam said.
“If you make the Red and any of them wagons still have the wheels on them, stick to the river and follow it west. There’s a place called the Narrows, where you might get through.”
Once they passed through the Narrows the great plain spread west before them. Though they had been on the prairie for weeks, none of them were prepared for the way the sky and the earth seemed to widen, once they rose onto the Llano Estacado. After a day or two on the llano the meaning of distance seemed changed. The great plain, silent and endless, became the world. In relation to the plain, they felt like ants. The smaller world of towns and creeks and clumps of forest seemed difficult to remember.
The whole troop was dismayed by the stretch of empty land ahead. If the Indians fell upon them when they were on the llano, what chance could they have?
Call drew his pistol, just in case, and mounted cautiously. Just as he did he saw movement out of the corner of his eye: three Comanches and their horses seemed to rise up, out of the bare earth, only a hundred yards away. Call spurred his horse, and bent low as she raced. He knew his only chance was to run. To his relief, Buffalo Hump was not one of his pursuers.
Call led them to the dead man, whom Shadrach recognized. “It’s Roy Char—he was a mining man,” Shadrach said.
“Oh, Señor Coronado, you mean,” Caleb said. “He didn’t find no city of gold—all he found was a lot of poor Indians. Your friend Mr. Char lost his life for nothing. The gold ain’t here.”
“I expect it was Kicking Wolf,” Bigfoot said. “He could steal horses out of a store.” “If I could catch the rascal I’d tie him to a horse’s tail and let the horse kick him to death,” Caleb said. “Since his name is Kicking Wolf it would be appropriate if the son of a bitch got kicked to death.”
With the night’s theft, the horse situation became critical. Three men were totally without mounts, and no man had more than one horse. To make matters worse, Tom, Matilda’s big gray, was one of the horses that had been stolen. She was now afoot. Matilda cried all morning.
Call felt shamed by the thought that he had not been keen enough to prevent the theft. “Why, I wasn’t sleepy a bit,” Gus said. “It couldn’t have happened on our watch. I can hear a rat move, when I’m that wide awake.” “You might could hear a rat, but you didn’t hear the Indians and you didn’t hear the horses leaving, either,” Call told him.
Bigfoot merely pointed west, where the whole horizon was yellow. “That ain’t sunrise,” he said, in a jerky voice. “That’s fire.”
“They set it,” he said. “The Comanches. They waited till the wind was right. Now we have the canyon at our backs and prairie fires on two sides.” “Three,” Caleb said, pointing west, where there was another fierce glow.
Call could look up and see flames at the canyon’s edge, but he knew Matilda’s fear was unfounded. Ash from the burning prairie floated down on them, but the fire was not going to curl over. He kept watching the Indians across the Palo Duro. It did seem that their horses were walking delicately, on the air itself.
“We’ll have to take care, now, and not get no toothaches,” Bigfoot said, his eyes still on the file of Indians across the canyon, who seemed to be walking on air.
Much of the extra ammunition had exploded. This surprised everyone, because no one could remember having heard an explosion. By hasty count more than twenty men were missing, fallen unobserved. In view of the fact that at least fifty Indians were to the west of them, not to mention the armies of Santa Fe, the loss of the ammunition was a grave problem. Various of the men commented apprehensively on this fact, but Bigfoot Wallace merely smiled.
“No promotion, Corporal,” Caleb said. “I wanted the dog, not the collar.”
“Just be glad you’re back on solid earth,” Bigfoot said. “I’m glad, all right—real glad,” Gus said.
