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Mary felt the familiar trembling now all through her body. It would go on when the unbearable headache came upon her and then it would go away.
She was trembling in a high vibrato of muscle and nerve.
As it grew on to black dark the wind increased. It shook everything that was not secure. Mary listened to it. She began to be afraid and the fear came on her like something creeping. Something she could not make go away. It was a spreading stain across her mind. She could not make the fear go away with prayer nor memorized verses of Saint Luke nor counting. In the uproar of the windstorm she thought she heard the sound of a hundred horses at a full gallop. She heard the door splintering on its hinges and all the precious civilized collection of objects thrown against the wall, everything
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while the windstorm tore like a Viking at the edges of the roof.
It was the dark of the moon. A dry wind swept the sky clean and the starlight was enough to see by and the vast scattering of the constellations burned overhead, random streams of remote blue-white gems.
Somewhere out on the plains coyotes carried these pieces away, trotting importantly through the grasses like it was a job of work.
the shadows of the short trees fell in a pouring dark stain for a long way out onto the grass.
In the eastern sky the shadow of the earth itself was cast into space.
In his nightly prayers Samuel asked only that he be made to understand why he was here. What to do. He had no doubt that there was some greater design, but he fell into a deep sadness as he knew he could not understand this design. It made him feel shallow. A ship holed in some vital strakes and sunk to the gunnels and adrift.
He got into his bed at night with a feeling that he was being besieged by hostile forces that sang without words just at the edge of the horizon,
Fifteen miles from San Antonio they captured two boys who within a year forgot every rule of behavior they knew and became skilled Comanche warriors.
His schoolteacher was a Friend named Thomas Beatty, and he was a good young man with an infinite supply of cheer who wanted more than life itself to go and live with the Kiowa to teach the children there in the lodges.
The stones of the Wichita Mountains had fallen wholesale into red heaps, and some stood isolated on the skyline in odd sentinels. One was very tall with a stone hat on its head. It regarded them from a sharp ridge as they rode by and when Samuel looked up with his hand on the crown of his hat it released them from its stone gaze and turned to wait for some other travelers.
Every day was a gift of peace. Samuel listened to the quiet as they rode. The silky grass pale as champagne lifting and falling in currents. Once when they stopped at noon to eat he saw a cactus fruit on the tip of a prickly-pear pad glowing like a candle. He stared at it. It seemed that it had some sort of small light inside. Then he saw that sunlight was pouring through a hole in the red fruit and that the fruit itself was hollowed out. He stood up and bent over it. Two bees were at work inside the cactus fruit, scouring away the sweet pulp. Sunlight coming in through the hole had lit up the
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From the crest of the hills Samuel saw a herd of mustangs in full flight across the undulating plain. They ran with nodding heads, and their thick wavy tails streamed behind them. They had trim legs and small hooves, crested necks and long flowing manes. They bore within themselves the Andalusian and Soraya blood from the horses who had escaped from the Spaniards centuries ago. He wondered what they were running from. There had to have been two hundred or more. Then he knew they were running because they wanted to, because the plains were open and level and they were made to run.
Samuel looked all about himself on the bare plains and thought what a miracle of endurance it was to live like this solely on God’s bounty, on whatever came to hand,
People of great courage and fortitude, born with an unsatisfied wanderlust so that their greatest joy was to break down the tipis and move on. They traveled alongside the rivers of the plains with their belts of trees and then crossed from one river to another and found things they had left behind in some other camp, or with delight they came upon a garden they had planted last year and was now bearing fruit. They did not live in the same world of time that Samuel did. There were no hours. No birthdays. And he must bring this to an end. That was his job. That was why he was here.
The boy listened with his beautiful eyes on the windowsill. Listened as he was sold by the man he had adored and whom he had imitated in everything. Followed across the hot plains, the man who had given him his Comanche name and approved of his aim with a rifle and his torture of a Mexican captive.
The schoolteacher showed them how to hold pencils in their hands, but Clinton seemed to think of the pencil as a weapon and held it like a knife until Beatty placed it in his fingers correctly and held his own hand over the boy’s callused hand and drew the point across a sheet of paper. Temple watched with his half-closed eyes and whispered, “What for? What for?”
They stood together in the cold December wind and saw the dust storming off to one side of the approaching horses and loose hair streaming in the wind. The spiky black design of lodgepoles heaped on either side of a mule. Dust boiled away from the hooves of their horses as if with every step they took they set the ground on fire.
Samuel sat in Grierson’s office in the stone commandant’s building and signed the arrest warrants. Grierson reached across the desk and took the papers from him. “I know this runs against your every belief,” he said. “I am sorry.” They were to be tried in a Texas court, since homicide was a state and not a federal crime. An engraving of President Grant hung in a dark frame over the fireplace, and an American flag hung limply from its staff.
“This is not going to be easy, Samuel.” “I know it.” Samuel stood up and jammed on his heavy wool coat with fierce and punitive thrusts of his arms.
“How kind of the army to put us up in its drafty barracks.” They walked down the quadrangle; stone buildings arranged around the long parade ground. On the verandas of the enlisted men’s barracks soldiers stood staring toward the guardhouse. “And you will refuse them food and blankets while they starve.” “I can forbid you the agency,” said Samuel. “But you will not, you will not.”
“We got to ride in the parlor car with the railroad nabobs. Treated to antelope chops and cold Krug, and I sat and observed starving Indians begging at the Wichita station.” Deaver slammed the newspaper down on top of his sketchbook. “How is it?” he asked. “How is it we do this to the original inhabitants of this continent?”
He sat quietly in the ruin of his own personal philosophies as if they were smoking timbers in a heap and felt as if he had just murdered someone, or perhaps abandoned someone in a burning building.
“You came here to bring peace and brotherly love, and you are going to preside over their destruction. My my.” “I have merely arrested four men who have admitted to murder and kidnapping.” Samuel sat with both hands loose in his lap. “There was nothing else I could do.” “Why should they be charged with murder? This is a war. They are at war with the Texas settlers, and now you are handing them over to Texas juries.
Samuel threaded his fingers together and regarded his shoes. “Mr. Simonton, this is the sort of conversation Harvard divinity students have with each other when drinking brandy in their rooms.”
He was hardening like pottery fired in a kiln.
He had the feeling that they might never again know who they were. That their identity might be held as some distant, lucid secret in the heart of God until the day they died. Like his own. Like his own.
The brass cartridge shells leaped from the breech like jewelry thrown to the wind.
all freighters for Henry Warren, government contractor.
Because of the Warren Wagon Train Massacre, President Grant rescinded the Peace Policy and the Quakers were removed from their position on the board of the Indian Bureau. Thus the long Red River War began and was finished only when the buffalo were destroyed and Ranald MacKenzie ran Quanah Parker to earth in Palo Duro Canyon in 1874 and shot seven hundred of his horses.
When Quanah Parker surrendered, there were at least two white warriors with his small band, who had fought alongside him for many years. And so it ended.
