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The Texans had brought their women and their children and their slaves right into the middle of the war land and expected to set up houses and fields and herds and live as if they were in Maryland, and were surprised on moonlit nights like this when Comanche arrows sang through the air in the dark.
A swarm of stars appeared against the eastern horizon as the moon went on westward.
he turned his mind toward the woman who was waiting for him at the end of all this. He thought of her kind face and it was like conjuring up a lighted window in this heartless landscape, a lighted window in an inhabited and comforting house.
Britt felt the wind in his face. It was blowing toward him but he could not detect the smell of woodsmoke.
He did not know where he had left his horses.
a great gray battleship of cloud stood in the north, wired with repeated strobes of dry lightning.
HE CROSSED THE Red River into Indian Territory late the following morning. He rode to the edge of the floodplain.
Britt searched up and down the bank, looking for a trail where people crossed. He had heard that the quicksand was deeper than a man was tall.
Above his head chill and massive ranges of clouds blossomed upward, tier upon tier,
There was light all around them and all around their war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.”
HE AND THE young Comanche sat on their horses downwind as a herd of two or three hundred bison walked deliberately down the long slope of the world and its tissues of wavering new grass.
THE TRAIN RATTLED through the flat country in the April rains. The roadbed of the Illinois Central was only a few feet above the level of the Wabash River,
He and other passengers and freight crossed the great river on a wallowing ferry that fought clumsily against the spring floodwater.
Going through the Ozarks he saw people who had not seen a razor or a bar of soap since the dawn of time.
“This is Mr. James Deaver, he is a correspondent
“I think you have a kind heart, Mr. Hammond.”
“If I have, it is God’s gift,” said Samuel and smiled.
I met Mother Bickerdyke, that remarkable woman.”
One small town was a ruin of brick shells and standing doorways without walls and all around these doorways and sometimes windows glittering black heaps of burned wood and brick at odd angles.
“That looks as if it were shelled,” said Samuel. “Are we in Missouri?” “Yes, there was quite a lot of fighting around here,” said Deaver. “I knew nothing of it.”
Baxter Springs, a small town in the farthest southeastern corner of Kansas. It lay just west of the Missouri line and just above the Oklahoma border. It had huddled in these rolling hills against the ravages of guerillas and partisan warfare since 1857. The people appeared comatose with the effort and blood expended to no known purpose. The train station was still draped in black in mourning for the death of Lincoln. It had faded to gray.
The white cones of their tipis rose up from a draw of post oak dotted with new leaves.
smoke rose up through the cranky limbs of the timber belt where they had camped.
It was instructive.” Samuel hesitated, and then said, “It was humbling.”
On both sides the great fragile cottonwoods with their chattering leaves.
Overhead, streaks of cirrus clouds streamed, pure and seraphic. Before them a flat-headed misty bluff stood out where the Washita River had carved around a headland.
They are rich with ritual and legend. They know the names of the beings that are stars. They have the story of their beginning. So we stay close to them, it is like being beside a good fire.
Their eyes were lucent, glowing and deep in the firelight, as if they had some intense illuminations inside their skulls.
The nighttimes were alive with distant noises, with disembodied beings, with great stars wheeling overhead.
A skull with some patches of skin and hair on it, the spine a jointed white puzzle,
His father and mother and sister were two days ahead of him and because he had said he would stay with the Kiowa and then run off in the dark of night his father did not have to pay for him with Cajun, his only riding horse. His mother could ride. Jube had stolen himself and Aperian Crow’s best horse.
It worried him and made the skin on his back crawl. He had seen what was done to captives who were recovered. He had helped do those things to them.
“We spend our lives in worlds remote from one another. We imagine we all live together on this round earth but we do not.”
“How many human beings remain in this world, unvanquished and at liberty in plains like these? So few, so few. Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”
“They are our great mystery. They are America’s great otherwise. People fall back in the face of an impenetrable mystery and refuse it. Yes, they take captives. Sometimes they kill women and old people. But the settlers are people who shouldn’t be where they are in the first place and they know it and they take their chances.”
It was as if he had left his body and had turned into a ghost and had gone out across the earth to haunt them.
“I am a free man,” said Britt. “Have been for years.” Hammond brightened. “Excellent! A free Negro! In Texas!” Britt’s face was still. He said, “Are you?” Hammond was silent a moment. “Am I what?” “Free.” Hammond was silent for a moment. Then he gave Britt a quick nod. “An excellent question. One worthy of pondering.”
A feeling of dread crawled up her back with a thousand legs.
Hammond, the Indian agent who was called Keeps-All-the-Stuff because he was refusing rations if captives were not brought in.
They knew he was thinking about when they had killed his son and raped his wife. Thoughts have power. They can drift through the air unhindered. Ill will and hatred, the lust for revenge, can detach itself from the person who generates these thoughts if that person has a certain power from some being. Even after the person is dead.
She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing. Of the sky shuttered away from her sight, herself hidden from the operatic excitement of the constant wind and the high spirits that came when they struck out like cheerful vagabonds across the wide earth with all of life in front of them and unfolding and perpetually new. And now herself shut in a wooden cave. She could not go out at dawn alone and sing, she would not be seen and known by the rising sun.
Sawdust spun out of the hub box, hot and golden.
“Mr. Nance says I got to go around to the back door and ask.” “Then go around to the back door.” Britt felt the flush rise to his head. The saddle-colored skin at his cheekbones and then at the tips of his ears. But you had to choose your fights. This was not one Britt was going to choose at the moment. Jube bit his lower lip and then turned away.
Britt knew he and the sergeant were sitting outside because black people were not allowed inside Nance’s store.
For a moment he asked himself where it would be better. Cities of the North, with their sections for blacks only. The South in ruins and seething with bitter ex-Confederates and confused and rootless freedmen. Unknown places with unknown rules, and all in a perilous state of flux.
A white man in cattleman’s boots and a broad hat came under the veranda roof of Nance’s store and strode toward Elijah Earl. “Get out of the way, nigger.” The white officer looked up with his round doorknob eyes. He said, “That’s sergeant nigger to you, cracker.” The man said, “All right then. Get out of my way, sergeant nigger.” Elijah Earl had not moved, nor had Britt and Paint. “Don’t mess with me,” said the white officer. “That’s my sergeant.” His head wavered. “Get used to it.” The man stood without speaking or moving for a moment. He had a tanned and simple face and he was young and
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Britt Johnson ran his wagons during times of raids and on routes no other freighter would take. He did it because he wanted them to know he was not afraid. That he had got back his wife and children and would not be made to cower around the forts and hide behind the soldiers, the black Ninth Cavalry or the white troops, either one. And the money was very good.
THAT YEAR OF 1867 the Comanche raided down across the Red River and once again struck Elm Creek and killed three young men, all of them nineteen years old. Rice Carleton, Patrick Profitt, Reuben Johnson. One of them was Moses Johnson’s grandson. They are buried in the Profitt graveyard where their bones lie together in the same grave to this day.
The two of them also seemed to have developed a light, hidden contempt for all the devices of civilization.
They seemed to have forgotten the years of childhood that preceded their life with the Kiowa as if it had only been a time of exile from their true lives in movement across the face of the great high-hearted plains and its sky and its winds.
