Dead Man's Walk (25 page)

Gus had not been along for the earlier river crossing, but he had crossed the Mississippi and had no fear of the Brazos.
"Why, this is just a creek," he said.
"I could swim it on my back." "I couldn't," Call told him. "I swum it twice and it was all I could do, even with a horse pulling me." There was no agreement as to the swimming capacity of sheep, so the twenty sheep were tied and tossed in the sturdiest of the wagons. Then, for no reason that anyone could determine, the wagon with the sheep in it capsized in midstream, drowning the driver--he got a foot tangled in the harness--two of the horses, and all twenty sheep. Three of the beeves wandered into quicksand on the south bank--they were mired so deep that Caleb ordered them shot.
Sam waded in mud to his thighs, with his butcher knife, to take what meat he could from the three muddy carcasses. Six merchants and four whores decided the Brazos was their limit, and turned back for the settlements. Brognoli was the only man to swim the river without a horse. It was rumoured that Brognoli could swim five miles or more, though there was no body of water large enough to allow the claim to be tested. Caleb Cobb crossed in a canoe he had brought along in one of the wagons for that purpose. The wagon they had been hauling the canoe in was hit by some heavy driftwood; it broke up just shy of the north bank. Only four wagons survived the crossing, but they were the ones containing the ammunition and supplies. The expeditionary force, though a little leaner, was still mostly intact. The four wagons had all they could haul as it was, but Caleb Cobb proceeded to hoist his canoe on top of the largest wagon, despite his scouts' insistence that he wouldn't need it.
"Colonel, most of the rivers between here and the Arkansas is just creeks," Bigfoot said.
"That canoe's wider than some of them. You could turn it upside down and use it as a bridge." "Fine, that's better than traveling wet," Caleb said. "I despise traveling wet." The fourth day north of the Brazos the post oak and elm petered out, and the troop began to move across an open, rolling prairie. There were still plenty of trees along the many creeks, so the troop didn't lack for firewood, but the traveling was easier, and the men's mood improved. Little seeping springs dotted the prairie, producing water that was clearer and more tasteful than that of the muddy Brazos. Deer were plentiful though small, but the men could scarcely raise an interest in venison. They expected to come on the great buffalo herd any day. They had all smelled the buffalo liver Sam had cooked for the Comanches, and were determined to try it for themselves.
Call and Gus had been made scouts, assigned to range ahead with Bes-Das and Alchise. Bigfoot the Colonel kept close at hand--though he valued Bigfoot's advice, he mainly wanted him handy because he was amused by his conversation. Shadrach had taken a cough, and roamed little. He rode beside Matilda Roberts, his long rifle always across his saddle.
They crossed the Trinity River on a sunny day with no loss of life other than one brown dog, a mongrel who had hung around the camp since the troop's departure. Sam liked the little dog and fed him scraps. The dog was swimming by a big bay gelding, when the horse panicked and pawed the dog down. Sam was gloomy that night, so gloomy that he failed to salt the beans.
The stars were very bright over the prairie, so bright that Call had trouble sleeping. The only Indians they had seen were a small, destitute band of Kickapoos, who seemed to be living off roots and prairie dogs. When asked if the buffalo herd were near, they shook their heads and looked blank.
"No buffalo," one old man said.
None of the men could figure out what had become of the buffalo--hundreds of thousands of them had crossed the Brazos less than a week before, and yet they had not seen one buffalo, or even a track. Call asked Bigfoot about it, and Bigfoot shrugged.
"When we got across the river, we turned west," he said. "I reckon them buffalo turned east." Even so, the men rode out every day, expecting to see the herd. At night they talked of buffalo, anticipating how good the meat would taste when they finally made their kills. In Austin, they had talked of women, or of notable card games they had been in; on the prairie, they talked of meat. Sam promised to instruct them all in buffalo anatomy--show them where the liver was, and how best to extract the tongue. After weeks in the trees, the breadth and silence of the prairie unnerved some of the men.
"Dern, I can't get cozy out here," Johnny Carthage observed. "There's nothing to stop the damn wind." "Why would you want to stop it--just let it blow," Gus said. "It's just air that's on the move." "It rings in my ears, though," Johnny said.
"I'd rather bunk up behind a bush." "I wonder how far it is, across this prairie?" Jimmy Tweed asked.
"Well, it's far," Blackie Slidell said. "They say you can walk all the way to Canada on it." "I have no interest in hearing about Canada," Jimmy Tweed said. "I'd rather locate Santa Fe and get me a shave." There was a whole group of men just come from Missouri, especially to join the expedition. They were a sour lot, in Gus's view, seldom exchanging more than a word or two with the Texans, and not many among themselves. They camped a little apart, and were led by a short, red-bearded man named Dakluskie. Gus tried to make friends with one or two of the Missourians, meaning to draw them into a card game, but they rebuffed him. The only one he developed a liking for was a boy named Tommy Spencer, no more than fourteen years old. Dakluskie was his uncle and had brought him along to do camp chores. Tommy Spencer thought Texas Rangers were all fine fellows. When he could, he sneaked over to sit at the campfire with them, listening to them yarn. He had a martial spirit, and carried an old pistol that was his pride.
"I wish I was from Texas," he told Gus. "There ain't no fighting much left, back in Missouri." The second day north of the Trinity, Gus and Call had ridden out with Bes-Das to scout for easy fords across the many creeks, when they came over a ridge and saw a running buffalo coming right toward them. The buffalo was a cow, and had been running awhile--her tongue hung out, and her gait was unsteady. Some thirty yards behind her an Indian was in pursuit, with a second Indian still farther back. The buffalo and her two pursuers appeared so suddenly that no one thought to shoot either the beast or the Comanches. The first Indian had a lance in his hand, the second one a bow. They rode right by Call, not thirty yards away, but seemed not to notice him at all, so focused were they on the buffalo they wanted to kill.
Bes-Das looked amused--he flashed a crooked-toothed smile, and turned his mount to lope back and watch the chase. Gus and Call turned, too--the encampment was only one or two miles back: the Comanches were chasing the exhausted buffalo right toward a hundred Texans and a few Missourians.
It was a warm, pretty morning. Most of the men were feeling lazy, hoping the Colonel would content himself with a short march for the day. They were lying on their saddles or saddle blankets, playing cards, discoursing about this and that, when suddenly the buffalo and the two Comanches ran right into camp, with Bes-Das, Call, and Gus loping along slightly to the rear. The spectacle was so strange and so unexpected that several of the men decided they must be dreaming. They lay or stood where they were, amazed. Caleb Cobb had just stepped out of his tent and stood dumbfounded, as a buffalo and two Comanches ran right in front of him, scarcely twenty feet away. The Irish dog had gone hunting, and missed the scene. Neither of the Comanches seemed to notice that they were right in the middle of a Ranger encampment, so intent were they on not letting their tired prey escape. They had passed almost through camp, from north to south, when a shot rang out and the buffalo cow fell dead, turning a somersault as she fell. Old Shadrach, shooting across his saddle, had fired the shot.
When the buffalo fell, the two Comanches stopped and simply sat on their horses, both of which were quivering with fatigue. The skinny warriors had a glazed look; they were too exhausted to get down and cut up the meat they had wanted so badly. Around the encampment, Rangers began to stand up and look to their guns. The Comanches came to with a start and flailed their horses before anyone could fire.
"Hell, shoot 'em--shoot 'em!" Shadrach yelled. His ammunition was over by Matilda's saddle--he could not get it and reload in time to shoot the Comanches himself.
The Rangers got off a few shots, but by then, the Comanches had made it into a little copse of post oak; the bullets only clipped leaves.
"Well, this is a record, I guess," Caleb said. "Two red Indians rode all the way through camp, chasing a tired buffalo, and nobody shot 'em." "It's worse than that," Call said. "We rode along with them for two miles, and didn't shoot 'em." "They were after the buffalo," Gus said. "They didn't even notice us." "No, they were too hungry, I expect," Bigfoot said. He had witnessed the event with solemn amazement. It seemed to him the Indians must have been taking some kind of powders, to miss the fact that they were riding through a Ranger camp.
"Yes, I expect so," Caleb said. "They wanted that buffalo bad." "Should we go get them, sir?" Long Bill asked. "Their horses are about worn out." "No, let them go, maybe they'll starve," Caleb said. "If I send a troop after them, they'll just kill half of it and steal themselves fresh horses." Shadrach was annoyed all day because no one had shot the Comanches.
"Bes-Das should have shot them, he seen them first," he said. "Bigfoot must have been drunk, else he would have shot 'em." Shadrach had begun to repeat himself--it worried Matilda Roberts.
"You say the same things, over and over, Shad," she told him, but Shadrach went right on repeating himself. Over and over he told her the story of how he saved himself in a terrible blizzard on the Platte: he killed a large buffalo cow, cut her open, and crawled inside; the cow's body stayed warm long enough to keep him alive.
Matilda didn't want to think of Shadrach inside a buffalo cow. Sam butchered the one the two Comanches had chased into camp; he made blood sausage of the buffalo blood, but Matilda didn't eat any. Shad's story was too much on her mind.
That night, lying with the old man as he smoked his long pipe, Matilda held his rough hand. The plains scared her--she wanted to be close to Shadrach. Since crossing the Brazos, she had begun to realize that she was tired of being a whore. She was tired of having to walk off in the bushes with her quilt because some Ranger had a momentary lust. Besides, there were no bushes anymore. Whoring on the prairies meant going over a hill or a ridge, and there could always be a Comanche over the hill or the ridge.
Besides, she had come to have such a fondness for Shadrach that she had no interest in going with other men, and in fact didn't like it. Shad's joints ached at times, from too many blizzards on the Platte and too many nights sleeping wet.
He groaned and moaned in his sleep. Matilda knew he needed her warmth, to ease his joints.
Shadrach had become so stiff that he could not reach down to pull his boots on and pull them off.
Matilda faithfully pulled them off for him.
No woman had been so kind before, and it touched him. He had begun to get surly when a Ranger with an interest in being a customer approached Matilda now.
"Would you ever get hitched, Shad?" Matilda asked, the night after the buffalo ran through camp.
"It would depend on the gal," Shadrach said.
"What if I was the gal?" Matilda asked.
It was a bold question, but she needed to know.
Shadrach smiled. He knew of Matilda's fondness for him, and was flattered by it. After all, he was old and woolly, and the camp was full of young scamps, some of them barely old enough to have hair on their balls.
"You--what would you want with me?" he asked, to tease her. "I'm an old berry. My pod's about dry." "I'd get hitched with you anyway, Shad," Matilda said.
Shadrach had been married once, to a Cree beauty on the Red River of the north. She had been killed in a raid by the Sioux, some forty years back. All he remembered about her was that she made the tastiest pemmican on the Northern plains.
"Why, Matty, I thought you had the notion to go to California," Shadrach said. "I've not got that much traveling in me, I don't expect.
I've done been west to the Gila and that's far enough west for me." "They'll have a train to California someday," Matilda said. "I'll wait, and we'll take the train. Until then I guess New Mexico will do, if it ain't too sandy." "I'd get hitched with you--sure," Shadrach said. "Maybe we'll run into a preacher, somewhere up the trail." "If we don't, we could ask the Colonel to hitch us," Matilda said.
A little later, when the old man was sleeping, Matilda got up and sneaked two extra blankets out of the baggage wagon. The dews had been exceptionally heavy at night.
She didn't want her husband-to-be getting wet on the dewy ground.
Black Sam saw her take the blankets.
He used a chunk of firewood for a pillow, himself. Sometimes, when the fire burned low, he would turn over and burn his pillow.
"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.
In two weeks the beeves were gone, and the troop was living on mush. The expedition had pointed to the northwest, and came to a long stretch of rough, bald country that led upward to a long escarpment. Though the escarpment was still fifty miles away, they could see it.
"What's up there?" Gus asked Bigfoot.
"Comanches," Bigfoot said. "Them and the Kiowa." The tall boy, Jimmy Tweed, had begun to bunk with Call and Gus. Jimmy and Gus were soon joshing each other and trying to outdo each other in pranks or card tricks. They would have tried to beat each other at whoring, but all the whores except Matilda had turned back at the Brazos, and Matilda had retired. So desperate was the situation that a youth from Navasota named John Baca was caught having congress with his mare. The troop laughed about it for days; Johnny Baca blushed every time anyone looked at him. But many of the men, in the privacy of their thoughts, wondered if Johnny Baca had not made a sensible move. Brognoli, the quartermaster, merely shrugged tolerantly at the notion of a boy having congress with a mare.
"Why not?" he asked. "The mare don't care." "She may not care, but I'll be damned if I'll go with a horse," Gus said.
"Besides, I don't own a mare," he added, a little later.