Dead Man's Walk (29 page)

The rim above him seemed halfway to the sky.
He could not even see the men who were holding the rope. He knew they were trustworthy men, but it would have reassured him to see them.
Suddenly he remembered the Comanches, the ones who had seemed to walk on air. What if they crossed the canyon and attacked? The men would drop him for sure--they'd have to.
"Lower me faster," he said. "I'm anxious to get back." When Gus was within fifteen yards of the dog, the dog began to whine and scratch. He knew Gus was coming to rescue him--but the rope didn't quite reach, and the stretch between the dog and Gus was stony and steep. Gus began to feel fear rising. If the men lost their hold, or if he slipped trying to grab the dog, he would fall hundreds of feet and be dead. He wanted the promotion, and he wanted Clara's love--yet his fear rose and swallowed the feelings that had caused him to volunteer.
A moment later, he came to the last foothold and saw that he was beaten: the rope was just too short.
"Colonel, can't you call him?" Gus yelled--"I can't go no lower--maybe he can come up a ways." Caleb Cobb gave a holler, and the dog began to scramble up.
"Ho, Jeb! Ho, Jeb!" Caleb yelled.
The dog made a frantic effort to scramble back up the cliff. He lunged upward just enough that Gus could grab its thick collar. But the weight of the dog was an immediate shock--the dog weighed as much as a small man. When Gus tried to lift the dog by its collar, Call was almost dragged over the edge--Bigfoot caught his belt, or he might have slipped off.
The weight of the dog cost Gus his narrow foothold. He swung free, into space, holding the dog's collar with one hand. Then, to his horror, he began to swivel. The rope was tied to his belt--the weight of the dog caused him to turn in the air. In a moment his head was pointed down and his legs were waving above him.
"Pull, pull!" he yelled. When he opened his eyes, the world swirled. One moment he would be facing the cliff, the next he would be looking into space. Once, when he twisted, two buzzards flew right by him, so close he felt the beat of their wings in the air.
Then, in a moment, the dog dropped, gone so quickly that he didn't even bark. Gus still had the collar in his hand--the dog's skinny head had slipped out. Gus twisted and twisted, as the men pulled him up. He lost consciousness; when he came to he was flat on his back, looking up at the great sky. Call and Bigfoot and Long Bill stood over him--the dog's collar was still tightly gripped in his hand. He reached up and handed it to Caleb Cobb, who took it, scowling.
"No promotion, Corporal," Caleb said.
"I wanted the dog, not the collar." Then he walked away.
"Just be glad you're back on solid earth," Bigfoot said.
"I'm glad, all right--real glad," Gus said.
The burned prairie ringed the canyon for five miles--the Rangers had to huddle where they were all day, lest the burnt grass damage their boots.
"Some of our horses might have made it out," Gus said. "I doubt they all burnt." "Buffalo Hump will have taken the ones that lived," Bigfoot said. "We've got to depend on our own feet now. I'm lucky I got big ones." "I ain't got big ones," Johnny Carthage said, apprehensively. "I ain't even got but one leg that's like it ought to be. How far is it we got to walk before we find the Mexicans?" No one answered his question, because no one knew.
"I expect it's a far piece yet," Long Bill said. "Long enough that we'll get dern thirsty unless we find a creek." Most of the men squatted or sat, looking at the blackened plain. In the space of a morning they had been put in serious peril. The thought of water was on every man's mind. Even with horses it had sometimes been hard to find water-holes. On foot they might stumble for days, or until they dropped, looking for water. Caleb Cobb was still very angry over the loss of his dog. He sat on the edge of the canyon, his legs dangling, saying nothing to nobody. The men were afraid to approach him, and yet they all knew that a decision had to be made soon. They couldn't just sit where they were, with no food and almost no water--some of the men had canteens, but many didn't. Many had relied on leather pouches, which had burnt or burst in the fire.
Finally, after three hours, Caleb stood up.
"Well, we're no worse off than old Coronado," he said, and started walking west.
The men followed slowly, afraid of scorching themselves. The plain was dotted with wands of smoke, drifting upward from smouldering plants. Call was not far behind Caleb--he saw Caleb reach down and pick up a charred jackrabbit that had been crisped coming out of its hole. Caleb pulled a patch of burned skin off the rabbit and ate a few bites of rabbit meat, as he walked.
Looking back, he noticed that Call was startled.
"We're going to have to eat anything we can scratch up now, Corporal," he said. "You better be looking for a rabbit yourself." Not ten minutes later, Call saw another dead rabbit. He picked it up by its leg and carried it with him--he did not feel hungry enough to eat a scorched rabbit; not yet. Gus, still weak from his scare, saw him pick it up.
"What's the jackrabbit for?" he asked.
"It's to eat," Call said. "The Colonel ate one. He says we have to eat anything we can find, now. It's a long way to where we can get grub." "I mean to find something better than a damn rabbit," Gus said. "I might find a deer or an antelope, if I look hard." "You better take what you can get!" Bigfoot advised. "I'm looking for a burnt polecat, myself. Polecat meat is tastier than rabbit." A little later he came upon five dead horses; evidently they had run into a wall of fire and died together. Call's little bay was one of them--remembering how the horse had towed him across the Brazos made him sad; even sadder was the fact that the charred ground ended only a hundred yards from where the horses lay. A little more speed, or a shift in the wind, and they might have made it through.
"Why are we walking off from this meat?" Shadrach asked. He wore moccasins--the passage through the hot plains had been an ordeal for him. Matilda Roberts half carried him, as it was. But Shadrach had kept his head--most of the men were so shocked by the loss of the horses and the terrible peril of the fire that they merely trudged along, heads down, unable to think ahead.
Caleb Cobb wheeled, and pulled out his big knife.
"You're right," he said. "We got horse meat, and it's already cooked. That's good, since we lost our cook." He looked at the weary troop and smiled.
"It's every man for himself now, boys," he said.
"Carve off what you can carry, and let's proceed." Call carved off a sizable chunk of haunch--not from his bay, but from another horse.
Gus whittled a little on a gelding's rump, but it was clear his heart was not in the enterprise.
"You better do what the Colonel said," Call said. "You'll be begging for mine, in a day or two." "I don't expect I will," Gus said.
"I've still got my mind on a deer." "What makes you think you could hit a deer, if you saw one?" Call asked. "It's open out here.
A deer could see you before you got anywhere near gunshot range." "You worry too much," Gus said. At the moment, meat was not what was on his mind. Caleb Cobb's treachery in denying him the promotion was what was on his mind. He had gone over the edge of the canyon and taken the risk. Suppose his belt had slipped off, like the dog's collar?
He would be dead, and all for a dog's sake. It was poor commanding, in Gus's view. He had been the only man who volunteered--he ought to have been promoted on that score alone. He had been proud to be a corporal, for awhile, but now it seemed a petty title, considering the hardship that was involved.
While he was thinking of the hardship, an awful thought occurred to him. They were now on the open plain, walking through waist-high grass. The canyon was already several miles behind them.
But where the Comanches were, no one knew. The Indians could be drawing a circle around them, even as they walked. If they fired the grass again, there would be no canyon to hide them. They had no horses, and even horses had not been able to outrun the fire.
"What if they set another fire, Woodrow?" Gus asked. "We'd be fried like that jackrabbit you're carrying." Call walked on. What Gus had just said was obviously true. If the Indians fired the grass again they would all be killed. That was such a plain fact that he didn't see any need to talk about it. Gus would do better to be thinking about grub, or water-holes, it seemed to him.
"Don't it even worry you?" Gus asked.
"You think too much," Call said. "You think about the wrong things, too. I thought you wanted to be a Ranger, until you met that girl. Now I guess you'd rather be in the dry goods business." Gus was irritated by his friend's curious way of thinking.
"I wasn't thinking about no girl," he informed Call. "I was thinking about being burned up." "Rangering means you can die any day," Call pointed out. "If you don't want to risk it, you ought to quit." Just as he said it an antelope bounded up out of the tall grass, right in front of them. Gus had been carrying his rifle over one shoulder, barrel forward, stock back. By the time he got his gun to his shoulder, the antelope was an astonishing distance away. Gus shot, but the antelope kept running. Call raised his gun, only to find that Gus was right between him and the fleeing animal. By the time he stepped to the side and took aim the antelope was so far away that he didn't shoot. Shadrach, who had seen the whole thing, was annoyed.
"You didn't need to shoot it, you could have hit it over the head with your gun," he said.
"Well, it moved quick," Gus said, lamely.
Who would expect an antelope to move slow?
The whole troop was looking at him, as if it was entirely his fault that a tasty beast had escaped.
The incident brought Bigfoot to life, though-- and Shadrach, too. The old man had entrusted his rifle to Matilda, but he got it back.
"That little buck was just half grown," Bigfoot said. "I doubt it will run more than a mile.
Maybe if we ease along we can kill it yet." "Maybe," Shadrach said. "Let's go." The two scouts left together--Caleb Cobb had been walking so far ahead that he was unaware of the incident until he decided it was time to make a dry camp for the night. He had heard the shot and supposed someone had surprised some game.
When he got back and discovered that both his scouts were gone in pursuit of an antelope, he was not pleased.
"Both of them went, after one little buck?" he asked. "Now, that was foolish, particularly when we got all this good horse meat to nibble on." Night fell and deepened, the sunset dying slowly along the wide western horizon.
Matilda Roberts was pacing nervously. She blamed herself for not having tried harder to discourage Shadrach from going after the antelope. Bigfoot was younger--he could have tracked the antelope alone.
By midnight the whole camp had given up on the scouts. Matilda could not stop sobbing.
Memory of Indians was on everybody's mind.
The two men could be enduring fierce tortures even then. Gus thought of the missed shot, time after time. If he only hadn't had his rifle over his shoulder, he could have hit the antelope. But all his remembering didn't help. The antelope was gone, and so were the scouts.
"Maybe they just camped and went to sleep," Long Bill suggested. "It's hard enough to find your way on this dern plain in the daylight. How could anyone do it at night?" "Shadrach ain't never been lost, night or day," Matilda said. "He can find his way anywhere. He'd be here, if he wasn't dead." Then she broke down again.
"He's dead--he's dead, I know it," she said. "That goddamn hump man got him." "If he wasn't dead, I'd shoot him, or Wallace one," Caleb said. "I lost my dog and both my scouts in the same day. Why it would take two scouts to track one antelope buck is a conundrum." "Say that again--a what?" Long Bill asked.
Brognoli sat beside him, his head still jerking, his look still glassy eyed. In the moments when his head stopped jerking, it was twisted at an odd angle on his neck.
"A conundrum," Caleb repeated. "I visited Harvard College once and happened to learn the word." "What does it mean, sir?" Call asked.
"I believe it's Latin," Gus said. One of his sisters had given him a Latin lesson, in the afternoon once, and he was anxious to impress Caleb Cobb with his mental powers--perhaps he'd make sergeant yet.
"Oh, are you a scholar, Mr. McCrae?" Caleb asked.
"No, but I still believe it's Latin--I've had lessons," Gus said. The lessons part was a lie. After one lesson of thirty minutes duration he had given up the Latin language forever.
"Well, I heard it in Boston, and Boston ain't very Latin," Caleb said. "Conundrum is a thing you can't figure out. What I can't figure out is why two scouts would go after one antelope." "Two's better than one, out here," Long Bill said. "I wouldn't want to go walking off without somebody with me who knew the way back." "If Shad ain't dead, he's left," Matilda said. "He was talking about leaving anyway." "Left to do what?" Caleb asked. "We're on the Staked Plains. All there is to do is wander." "Left, just left," Matilda said. "I guess he didn't want to take me with him." Then Matilda broke down. She sobbed deeply for awhile, and then her sobs turned to howls. Her whole body shook and she howled and howled, as if she were trying to howl up her guts.
In the emptiness of the prairies the howls seemed to hover in the air. They made the men uneasy--it was as if a great she-wolf were howling, only the she-wolf was in their midst. No one could understand it.
Shadrach had gone off to kill an antelope buck, and Matilda was howling--a woman abandoned.
Many of the men shifted a little, wishing the woman would just be quiet. She was a whore. No one had asked her to form an attachment to old Shadrach anyway. He was a mountain man--mountain men were born to wander.
Several men had been hoping Matilda would become a whore again--they had a long walk ahead, and a little coupling would at least be a diversion. But hearing her howl, the same men, Long Bill among them, began to have second thoughts. The woman was howling like a beast, and a frightening beast at that. Coupling with her would be risky. Besides, old Shadrach might not be gone.
He might return at an inconvenient time and take offense.
Caleb Cobb was unaffected by Matilda's howling. He was eating a piece of horse meat-- he glanced at Matilda from time to time. It amused him that the troop had become so uneasy, just because a woman was crying. Love, with all its mystery, had arrived in their midst, and they didn't like it. A whore had fallen in love with an old man of the mountains. It wasn't supposed to happen, but it had. The men were unnerved by it--such a thing was unnecessary, even unnatural. Even the Comanches, in a way, worried them less.