Dead Man's Walk (12 page)

"Boys, it's clouding up," Long Bill said late in their first day out of San Antonio. "I expect we're in for a drenching." "I'd rather ride all night than sleep wet," Rip Green observed.
"Not me," Gus said. "If I have to be wet I'd just as soon be snoozing." "There's plenty of farms up this way," Matilda said. "German families, mostly.
If we could find a farm they might let us sleep on the floor. Or if they have some kind of shed for the stock, maybe we could crawl under it." As the sun was dipping, Call noticed that the whole southwestern quadrant of the sky had turned coal black. In the distance there was a rumbling of thunder. At the horizon the blackness was cut through with streaks of golden light from the setting sun, but the light at the bottom only made the blackness of the upper sky seem blacker. A wind rose-- it whirled Call's straw hat off his head and sailed it a good thirty feet, which annoyed him. He hated above all to lose control of his headgear.
Long Bill cackled at the sight.
"You ought to have a good fur cap, like I do," he said.
They crested a ridge and spotted just what Matilda had been hoping for--a little farm. There was only one building in the little clearing, but it was a sizable log building.
"It'll hold us all, snug, if the family is friendly," Blackie Slidell observed.
"I hope they're cooking pork, if they're cooking," Gus said. "I'd enjoy a good supper of pork." Call retrieved his hat, but the wind had risen so that he saw no point in sticking it back on his head. All the men were holding their hats on by this time. They were a mile or two from the little cabin, and the darkness in the sky was swelling, pushing toward them. It abruptly extinguished the sunset, but the force of the sun left an eerie light over the long prairie ahead.
The rumblings of the thunder were deeper. Call had seen many storms, and paid them little mind, but this one caught his attention. It had been a sultry day --the wind coming out of the cloud wasn't cool. It was a sultry wind, and it blew fitfully, at first.
Some gusts were so strong they caused his horse to break stride--of course, his horse was just a skinny nag that had been underfed for the last few weeks. It wouldn't take much of a wind to blow him off course.
"Why, look at that," Gus said. "That dern cloud is behaving like a snake." Call looked, and saw that it was true. A portion of the cloud had formed itself into a column, or funnel, and was twisting through the lower sky in a snakelike motion.
"You damn young fools, that's a cyclone," Matilda said. "We better race for that cabin." The snake cloud was dipping closer and ever closer to the ground, sucking up dust and weeds as it twisted. A hawk that had been skimming the ground looking for mice or quail rose, and sped away; Call saw two deer bolt from a little thicket and flash their white tails as they raced off, away from the twisting cloud. The cloud was roaring so loudly by then that the horses began to rear and pitch. They wanted to run away, like the deer.
"We won't make that cabin, we need to lay flat," Long Bill advised. "That's what you do when a cyclone hits. We best find a ditch or a gully or something, or we're done for." "There's a buffalo wallow," Blackie said.
"That's all I see." "It ain't deep," Gus said. He had been feeling good, enjoying the thought of adventure, and now a dangerous cloud had come out of nowhere and spoiled his feeling. They were scarcely a mile from the cabin, but the spinning, roaring, sucking cloud was coming too fast. All day Gus had tensed himself and strained his eyes, looking for Indians. He didn't want to see the humpbacked Comanche charge out of a thicket with his lance raised. If Buffalo Hump showed up, or any hostile red man, he was prepared to run and shoot. The last thing he had expected was deadly weather, but now deadly weather was two hundred yards away. A bobcat burst from a thicket and began to run in the same direction as the deer.
The Rangers reached the little wallow and jumped off their mounts.
"What about the horses?" Call yelled, as the roar increased.
"The devil with the horses--get flat!" Long Bill advised. "Get flat and don't look up." Call did as he was told. He released his rearing mount and flattened himself under the edge of the shallow wallow. The other Rangers did the same.
Gus was fearful of Matilda's chances--she was so big she couldn't really hide in anything as shallow as a buffalo wallow. But there was no time to dig--she would just have to hope for the best.
Then the roaring became so loud that none of them could think. Call's loose shirt billowed up--he thought the wind inside it was going to lift him off the ground. There was a kind of seething noise, like a snake's hiss, only louder--it was the sound of the sand being sucked up from the shallow wallow. It was pitch black by then--as black as a moonless midnight.
Gus was wishing he'd never come to Texas--what was it but one danger after another? He had been thinking about the cabin ahead, and the pork chop he hoped to eat, and now he had his face in the dirt, being pulled at by a cloud that was like a giant snake. In Tennessee clouds didn't behave like that. Besides, their horses were lost, though they had scarcely traveled half a day. Both his pistols were on his saddle, too--if he survived the storm and Buffalo Hump showed up, he would be helpless.
The sound of the cyclone was so loud, and the dust swirling up beneath them so thick, that some of the Rangers felt they were being deafened and suffocated at the same time. Blackie Slidell, who was limber, managed to bend his neck and get his nose inside his shirt, so he could breathe a little better.
But the whirling and roaring slowly diminished--when the Rangers felt it safe to lift their heads, they saw sunlight beneath the black edge of cloud, far to the west. The eerie light still hung over the prairie, a light that seemed hellish to Rip Green.
"I expect this is the kind of light you get once you're dead," he commented.
Matilda sat up, relieved. She had heard that cyclones took people up in the air and blew them as much as forty miles away. People who survived such removals were never again right in the head, so she had heard. Of course, being heavy, she herself was less likely than some to blow away, but then wagons sometimes blew away, and she was no heavier than a wagon.
"Are we all alive?" she asked. The grey light was so strange it made them all look different--most of them had been so scared while they were pressing themselves into the wallow that their voices sounded strange when they tried to talk.
"We're alive but we're afoot," Call said. Though unnerved, he hadn't really had time to be very frightened--the cyclone was a thing beyond him or any man. An Indian he could fight, but who could fight a roaring snake of air? His hat was gone--all the hats were gone, except Long Bill Coleman's fur cap, which he had stuffed beneath him as he clutched the sand.
"We ought to have tied them horses, somehow," Call added. "I expect they've run halfway back to San Antonio by now." "I'd rather lose my horse than blow away," Gus said. "Them was just thirty-dollar horses anyway." "I could spare the nag, but they took everything we own with them," Blackie said.
"We'll have to hobble into Austin and hope they allow us credit." "You boys are green--them horses ain't run far," Long Bill said. "They'll show up in the morning, or else we'll track 'em." Now that he had survived the cyclone, Gus began to feel lively. The storm had scared his headache away, but not his appetite.
"I'm still in the mood for a pork chop," he said. "Let's go on to that cabin. They might just be sitting down to supper." Having no other prospect to hand, the Rangers adopted the suggestion, only to find that the cyclone had obliterated the cabin where they had hoped to bunk. When they got to the ridge where it had been, there were only a few logs in place, and six unhappy people were stumbling around weeping and looking dazed--four children and a man and a woman. The man and the woman had lanterns and were shining them in the rubble, hoping to locate a few possessions to pile up. The four children had been scared into silence. One little girl was chewing on the hem of her dress.
Her father, a stout young man with a full beard, was inquiring about his roof in the bewildered tone that a man might use to complain about a mislaid hammer.
"Where's my roof, dammit?" the young man said.
"It was here and now it's gone. I worked a week on my roof--now I guess it's blown plumb over into the woods." "Well, we lost our horses," Gus said-- a little callously, Call felt. The stout man with the beard had a family to house. Losing a thirty-dollar horse with a cheap saddle and blanket on it was not a loss on the same scale as the man's roof.
The area where the cabin had been was a wild litter. It was almost dark, but the Rangers could see that clothes and utensils and tools and animals were as jumbled as if they had all been hastily shoveled out of a wagon. A black rooster stood on one of the fallen logs, complaining loudly. Two shoats were grunting and rooting amid the mess, and several hens squawked.
No one paid much attention when Matilda and the six Rangers came walking up in the last of the light. The only person who seemed reasonably calm was the young woman of the house, and she was quietly picking up utensils and clothes and putting them in neat piles.
"Dern the luck--it's a pain to lose that roof," the stout man said. He didn't address the remark either to his wife or to the Rangers--he seemed to be talking to himself.
"That's enough cussing, Roy," the young woman said.
"We got visitors, and the children don't need to hear you cussing just because the cabin got blown away. We can build another cabin." "I can, you mean, Melly," the man said. "You ain't strong enough to hoist no logs." "I said we got visitors, Roy--why don't you be polite and ask them to sit, at least?" the young woman said, with a flash of temper.
"You have to take weather as it comes," she added.
"Cussing don't change it." "Here, maybe we can help you pick up," Gus offered. He liked the looks of the young woman, Melly. Even in the dim light he could tell she was pretty. The husband seemed a rude sort--Gus felt it was a pity he hadn't been blown away. A young woman that pretty might entice him to give up rangering, if she took a notion.
"Well, men, I hope you ain't thieves, because our worldly possessions are spread out here for the picking of any damn thieves who happen to walk up," Roy said. He was still agitated by the loss of his roof.
The Rangers did what they could by lantern light to help the little family reassemble its scattered possessions. There were no pork chops, but the young woman did have some bacon and a little cornmeal. Long Bill Coleman was a master fire builder; he soon had a good blaze going in the ruins of the little chimney. They all ate bacon and corn cakes and talked about how curious it was to see an ordinary thundercloud turn into a cyclone.
"It sucked the dern bark off that tree over there," Roy said, pointing in the darkness to a tree nobody could see. "What kind of wind would suck the bark off an elm tree?" "We're all alive, though, thank the Lord," Melly observed gratefully. She was sitting by Matilda Roberts. Though too polite to inquire, she was wondering what kind of woman would be traipsing across the prairies with six Texas Rangers. Of course on the frontier, things were less regular than they had been in eastern Missouri, where she was from.
Matilda, for her part, indulged in a little daydream in which she was married to a farmer with a beard, and had four tykes, some chickens, and a couple of shoats. In those circumstances she would have no need to accept whatever smelly ruffian came along with a dollar or two and a stiffness in his pants.
The little children, none of them yet five according to their mother, were curled up like little possums, asleep on a quilt that had escaped wetting. Long Bill Coleman brought out his harmonica--he never trusted it to his saddlebags but kept it about his person, and played a tune called "Barbara Allen." 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 the moment, well enough fed; but the very next day another storm might come, or an Indian party, and then they wouldn't be.
"Well, I can't dance to that old song," Gus informed Long Bill. "I prefer tunes that I can dance to." "Why then, here's "Buffalo Gals,"" Long Bill said--he was soon playing a livelier melody. Gus got up and jigged around, hoping to impress Melly with his dancing.
Rip Green joined him for a bit, but the others refused to dance.
"I'll be damned if I'll dance on the night my roof blew off," Roy said.
A little later Roy took his lantern and rummaged around until he found his whiskey jug, which he passed around freely. Long Bill Coleman soon put away his harmonica in order to drink, which annoyed Gus a little, because he wasn't through dancing. He was even more convinced that he would make a good husband for Melly-- certainly a better husband than the surly Roy.
When dawn came, Roy found most of his roof at the edge of a little live-oak thicket, over a hundred yards from where the cabin stood.
Long Bill was right about the horses--they were all found within half a mile of the buffalo wallow.
There was no more bacon, but Melly made them a breakfast of corn cakes and chickory coffee.
Roy, realizing that he had an excellent labor force at hand, tried to persuade the Rangers to stay and help him rebuild his cabin.
Gus McCrae wouldn't have minded. Melly had a peaches-and-cream complexion. She looked even prettier in the morning than she had in the dim dusk. But the other Rangers pleaded urgent business in Austin--they were soon mounted and ready to go.
"We're off to take Santa Fe," Blackie Slidell informed the homesteaders.
"Caleb Cobb's our leader." "Santa Fe?" Roy asked. "You mean Santa Fe, out in New Mexico?" "That's the town--what of it?" Rip Green said, noticing that Roy wore a somewhat skeptical expression.
"Why, it's over a thousand miles from here," Roy said. "You could get there quicker if you started from St. Louis. There's a good trail from St.