Dead Man's Walk (28 page)

She was now afoot. Matilda cried all morning. She had a fondness for Tom. The sight of Matilda crying unnerved the whole camp.
Since taking up with Shadrach Matilda had raged less--everyone noted her mildness. But watching such a large woman cry was a trial to the spirit. It fretted Shadrach so that he grew restless and rode out of camp, over Matilda's protests.
"Now he'll go off and get killed," Matilda said.
"Well, if you hush up that crying, maybe he'll come back," Long Bill said. He was one of the men who was afoot, and as a result, was in a sour mood. The prospect of walking to Santa Fe, across such a huge plain, did not appeal to him--but the thought of walking back to Austin didn't appeal to him, either. He had seen what had just happened to the mining man, Roy Char. He was determined to stay with the troop, even if it meant blisters on his feet.
Call and Gus had both been on guard, in the darkest part of the night. Call felt shamed by the thought that he had not been keen enough to prevent the theft.
"Why, I wasn't sleepy a bit," Gus said. "It couldn't have happened on our watch. I can hear a rat move, when I'm that wide awake." "You might could hear a rat, but you didn't hear the Indians and you didn't hear the horses leaving, either," Call told him.
That night Call, Bigfoot, and a number of other guards periodically put their ear to the ground to listen. All they heard was the tramp of their own horses in the rope corral. In addition to the rope, most of the horses had been hobbled, so they couldn't bolt. Call and Gus had the watch just before sunrise. They moved in circles around the herd, meeting every five minutes. Call was certain no Indians were there. It was only when dawn came that he had a moment of uncertainty. He saw the beginnings of the sunrise --the light was yellow as flame. But the yellow light was in the west, and dawn didn't come from the west.
A second later Bigfoot saw it too, and yelled loud enough to wake the whole camp.
"That ain't the sunrise, boys!" he yelled.
Just as he said it, Call saw movement to the north. Two Indians had sneaked in and slipped the hobbles on several horses. Call threw off a shot, but it was still very dark--he could no longer see anything to the north.
"Damn it all, they got away again," he said. "I don't know how many horses they got away with, this time." "Don't matter now, we've got to head back to that last creek," Bigfoot said.
"Why?" Call asked, startled.
Bigfoot merely pointed west, where the whole horizon was yellow.
"That ain't sunrise," he said, in a jerky voice. "That's fire." The troop had no sooner turned to head back south toward the little creek Bigfoot mentioned when they saw the same yellow glow on the prairie south of them. The flames to the west were already noticeably closer. Bigfoot wheeled his mount, and rode up to Caleb.
"They set it," he said. "The Comanches. They waited till the wind was right. Now we have the canyon at our backs and prairie fires on two sides." "Three," Caleb said, pointing west, where there was another fierce glow.
The whole troop immediately discerned the nature of their peril. Call looked at Gus, who tried to appear nonchalant.
"We'll have to burn or we'll have to jump," Call said. "I hate the thought of burning most, I guess." Gus looked into the depths of the canyon--he was only twenty feet from its edge. The prairie now was a great ring of burning grass. Though he sat calmly on his horse, waiting for Bigfoot and the Colonel to decide what to do, inside he felt the same deep churning that he had felt beyond the Pecos. The Indians were superior to them in their planning. They would always lay some clever trap.
"Ride, boys," Bigfoot said. "Let's try the west--it's our best chance." Soon the whole troop was fleeing, more than twenty of the men mounted double for lack of horses.
Shadrach took Matilda on behind him--he rode right along the canyon edge, looking for a way down.
"I believe we could climb down afoot," he told Caleb. "If we can get a little ways down, we won't burn. There's nothing to burn, on those cliffs." Caleb stopped a minute, to appraise the fire. The ring had now been closed. With every surge of wind the fire seemed to leap toward them, fifty yards at a leap. The prairie grass was tall--flames shot twenty and thirty feet in the air.
"The damn fiends," Caleb said. "Maybe we can start a backfire, and get it stopped.
I've heard that can be done." "No time, and the wind's wrong," Bigfoot said. "I think Shad's right. We're going to have to climb a ways down." Caleb hesitated. It might be the only good strategy, but it meant abandoning their mounts. There was no trail a horse could go down. They might survive the fire, but then what? They would be on the bald prairie--no horses, no supplies, no water. How long would it take the Comanches to pick them off?
The troop huddled around Bigfoot and their commander. All eyes were turned toward the fire, and all eyes were anxious. The flames were advancing almost at loping speed. They were only three hundred yards away. The men could hear the dry grass crackle as it took flame. When the wind surged there was a roar, as the flames were sucked into the sky.
Call felt bitter that their commander had had no more forethought than to bring them to such an exposed place. Nothing about the expedition had been well planned. Of course, no one would have imagined that the Indians could steal horses at will, from such a tight guard. But now they were caught: he imagined Buffalo Hump, somewhere on the other side of the flames, his lance in his hand, waiting to come in and take some scalps.
Caleb Cobb waited until the flames were one hundred yards away to make his decision.
He waited, hoping to spot a break in the flames, something they might race through. But there was no break in the flames--the Indians who set the fire had done an expert job. The ring of flames grew tighter every minute. General Lloyd, drunk as usual, was shivering and shaking, although the heat from the great fire was already close enough to be felt.
"We're done for now--we'll cook," he said.
"No, but we will have to climb down this damn cliff," Caleb said, turning his horse toward the canyon's edge. No sooner had he turned than he heard a gunshot--General Phil Lloyd had taken out his revolver and shot himself in the head. His body hung halfway off his horse, one foot caught in a stirrup.
The horses were beginning to be hard to restrain, jumping and pitching, their nostrils flaring. Two or three men were thrown--one horse raced straight into the flames.
"Let's go boys--keep your guns and get over the edge, as best you can," Caleb yelled.
To Gus's relief the canyon walls were not as sheer as they had first looked. There were drop-offs of a hundred feet and more, but there were also humps and ledges, and inclines not too steep to negotiate.
The Irish dog went down at a run, his tail straight in the air. Before the men had scrambled thirty feet down there was another tragedy: the horses were in panic now--some raced into the flames, but others raced straight off into the canyon. Some hit ledges, but most rolled once or twice and fell into the void. One of the leaping horses fell straight down now on Dakluskie, the leader of the Missourians.
Several of the Rangers saw the horse falling, but Dakluskie didn't. He was crushed before he could look up. The horse kept rolling, taking Dakluskie with it. General Lloyd's horse made the longest leap of all--he flew over the group and fell out of sight, General Lloyd's body still dangling from the stirrup.
"Oh God, look there!" Gus said, pointing across the canyon. "Look at them--where are they going?" Not all of the men could afford to look--some of them clung to small bushes, or balanced on narrow ledges in terror. Over them the fire roared right to the edge of the canyon; the heat made all of them sweat, although they were cold with fear.
Call looked, though, and so did Caleb Cobb. At first Call thought it was goats, creeping along the face of the cliff across the canyon. Just as he looked, a ledge crumbled under Black Sam--Call saw a startled look on Sam's face, as he fell. He did not cry out.
"My God, look at them!" Caleb said.
Across the canyon, on a trail so narrow that they had to proceed single file, a party of fifty Comanches were moving west. It seemed from across the great distance that the Comanches were walking on air.
In the lead was Buffalo Hump, with the lance Gus had imagined in his fear.
"Look at them!" Bigfoot said. "Are they flying?" "No, it's a trail," Shadrach told him.
He was on a tiny ledge of rock, with Matilda. He shushed her like a child, hoping to keep her from making a foolish movement.
"What if the fire don't stop?" Matilda asked, looking upward. She had always been scared of fire; now she could not stop trembling. She expected flames to curl over the edge of the canyon and come down and burn her shirt. She had such a horror of her clothes being on fire that she began to take her shirt off.
"What ... stop that!" Shadrach said, one eye on Matilda and the other eye on the Comanches.
"No, I have to get this shirt off, I don't want to burn up in it," Matilda said, and she half undressed on the small ledge.
Call could look up and see flames at the canyon's edge, but he knew Matilda's fear was unfounded. Ash from the burning prairie floated down on them, but the fire was not going to curl over.
He kept watching the Indians across the Palo Duro. It did seem that their horses were walking delicately, on the air itself.
"Can you see a trail--you've got those keen eyes?" Call asked Gus.
Gus himself had to squint--smoke was floating over the canyon now, from the fire. But when he looked close he could see that the Indians weren't flying. Buffalo Hump was picking his way slowly, a step at a time, along a small trail.
"He ain't flying, there's a trail," he said. "But if any man could fly I expect it would be that rascal. It felt like he was flying that night he chased me." "I don't care if they're flying or walking," Caleb said--he was clinging to a small bush. "I'd be happier if they were going in the other direction--it looks like they're flanking us." Just then the dentist, Elihu Carson, lost his balance and began to roll downward.
"Grab his foot!" Call yelled to Long Bill, who was nearest the falling man. Long Bill grabbed but missed by an inch or less. His own situation was so precarious that he did not dare lean farther. The dentist bounced off a boulder and flew out of sight, screeching loudly as he vanished.
"We'll have to take care, now, and not get no toothaches," Bigfoot said, his eyes still on the file of Indians across the canyon, who seemed to be walking on air. When the Rangers crawled back out of the canyon, the prairie was black and smouldering, as far as anyone could see. Here and there a little bush, a cactus or a pack rat's den still showed a trace of flame. Several dead horses were in sight; the gear the men had dumped smouldered like the rats' dens. Young Tommy Spencer was sobbing loudly. Dakluskie had been his only relative. Black Sam was gone, and the dentist --Brognoli had been kicked in the neck by a falling horse, and sat glassy eyed. His head was set at an odd angle; from time to time his head seemed to jerk, backward and forward, quickly. He couldn't speak, though whether from fear or injury no one yet knew.
Much of the extra ammunition had exploded. This surprised everyone, because no one could remember having heard an explosion. By hasty count more than twenty men were missing, fallen unobserved. In view of the fact that at least fifty Indians were to the west of them, not to mention the armies of Santa Fe, the loss of the ammunition was a grave problem. Various of the men commented apprehensively on this fact, but Bigfoot Wallace merely smiled.
"I ain't worried about bullets, yet," he said. "We're afoot, and there ain't many water holes. We'll probably starve before we can find anybody to shoot." Caleb Cobb's Irish dog, Jeb, had gone so far down the cliff that he could not get back up. He was crouched more than a hundred feet below on a small ledge, in danger of falling off down a sheer cliff at any moment.
"I've either got to shoot him or rescue him," Caleb said. "Any volunteers for a dog rescue?" The troop was silent--the thought of going over the edge again, just to rescue a dog that no one but Caleb liked, did not appeal.
"I'll make the man a sergeant who'll rescue my damn dog," Caleb said.
"I'll do it," Gus said, at once. He was thinking of Clara Forsythe when he said it. The dog's dilemma had presented him with a golden opportunity to get ahead of Call. Once ahead, in the race for rank, he meant to stay ahead. Clara would probably hurry to kiss him, if he came back from the trip a sergeant.
Corporal Call wouldn't loom so large--not then.
Call was startled by his friend's foolish offer.
There was no footing around the dog at all--just a tiny ledge. There was not a bush or a tree within twenty feet of the dog--there was nothing to hold on to. Besides that, the dog was big.
"Gus, don't do it," Call said. "You'll go on over, like the dentist." But Gus was in a reckless mood, emboldened by the thought of how proud Clara would be of him, when he returned a sergeant. It was a steep stretch between him and the dog, but he had been over the edge of the canyon once and had survived. No doubt he could survive again.
"Somebody tie a rope to me," he said.
"That'll be safe enough--unless all the ropes burnt up." Call and Long Bill quickly poked through the smouldering baggage, using their rifle barrels to turn the hot rags and smoking blankets. They found three horsehide ropes that, though charred, were not burnt through. Call inspected them carefully, inch by inch, to see if there were any weak spots in the rawhide. He found none.
"I still think it's foolish," he said, as he carefully tied the ropes together. Even with all three ropes knotted into one, it still looked short to him. Every time he looked over the edge of the canyon the dog seemed farther away. The dog had brayed himself out. He lay flat on the ledge now, his head on his paws. His tail stuck over the chasm.
Six Rangers, Call at the front, held the end of the rope and lowered Gus slowly over the canyon rim. In places there were bushes he could hold on to. Caleb Cobb stood at the edge of the canyon, supervising the operation.
"The point about heights is that you don't want to look down, Corporal," he said. "Just look at the dirt in front of you." Gus took the advice. He studiously kept his eyes on the cliff wall, reaching down carefully, a foot at a time. Though he didn't look down, he did look up, and immediately felt a serious flutter in his stomach.