Dead Man's Walk (10 page)

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 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 behaviour.
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.
part II
"Where is Santa Fe?" Call asked, when he first heard that an expedition was being got up to capture it. Gus McCrae had just heard the news, and had come running as fast as he could to inform Call so the two of them could be among the first to join.
"They say Caleb Cobb's leading the troop," Gus said.
Call was as vague about the name as he had been about the place. Several times, it seemed to him, he had heard people mention a place called Santa Fe, but so far as he could recall, he had not until that moment heard the name Caleb Cobb.
Gus, who had been painting a saloon when the news reached him, was highly excited, but short on particulars.
"Why, everybody's heard of Caleb Cobb," he said, though in fact the name was new to him as well.
"No, everybody ain't, because I ain't," Call informed him. "Is he a soldier, or what? I ain't joining up if I have to work for a soldier again." "I think Caleb Cobb was the man who captured old Santa Anna," Gus said.
"I guess sometimes he soldiers and sometimes he don't. I've heard that he fought Indians with Sam Houston himself." The last assertion was a pure lie, but it was a lie with a serious purpose, and the purpose was to overcome Woodrow Call's stubborn skepticism and get him in the mood to join the expedition that would soon set out to capture Santa Fe.
Call had four mules yet to shoe and was not eager for a long palaver. There had been no rangering since the little troop had returned to San Antonio, though he and Gus were still drawing their pay.
Idleness didn't suit him; from time to time he still lent old Jesus a hand with the horseshoeing.