[Texas Rangers 02] - Badger Boy (14 page)

Wolf Eyes said the war's end had aroused consternation among the many peoples who lived on the reservation and in the territory beyond. Some, like those near-whites known as Cherokees, had been divided in their loyalties, many fighting alongside men of the north, others allying with the South. What the Cherokees did was always a source of puzzlement to Steals the Ponies. They walked along the white man's road in the way they lived and thought. He did not consider them to be of the same race as the Comanche.

He had been told that the whites saw all red men as being of one people, though reason proved that it was not true. Comanches had little in common with the Cherokees or the others who had migrated from some distant eastern land and tried to make themselves white. To suggest that Comanches had anything in common with the accursed Apaches was an insult. To Steals the Ponies, each tribal group was a race apart. The Comanches were
The
People, the chosen ones, a superior race. All others were allowed to live or willed to die at the discretion of the True Human Beings.

Steals the Ponies had heard old men say the world was large, that it would take many seasons to ride all the way across it on even the fastest horse. His father had told him of visiting a great water, so wide he could not see the far side. The elders said there were many more races of men than he had ever heard about, and each race had its own manner of speaking. One would reason that they must have a common sign language like the plains people so they could make themselves understood to strangers. He had noted, however, that most white men did not seem to have the same signals as The People. They moved their hands a lot as they talked, but the meanings were lost to him.

Nor could he distinguish much difference between white men, though the elders claimed they were of many races. They all looked more or less alike except that some were hairier than others. Their talk was gibberish, as empty as the chatter of the gray cranes that wintered around the many playa lakes shimmering on the plains after a season of rain. How they understood one another was beyond his imagining. It stood to reason that one had to be born white to talk that way, and one had to be born Comanche to know The People's language.

Yet, Steals the Ponies had a foster brother who was white. His father had captured him on a raid and brought him home as a small boy. At first Badger Boy had babbled in the white man's undecipherable tongue. Now nine or ten summers old, he spoke Comanche almost as if he had been born to it.

Steals the Ponies wondered if he would ever understand life's puzzling contradictions.

After lengthy consideration, he told Wolf Eyes, "The white men have fought each other a long time. It is not reasonable that they would stop now while so many on both sides still live. We shall go and see for ourselves."

Wolf Eyes was more than willing, for the ranger warrior society had thwarted the last two raids in which he had participated. "How many of us will go? Do you think we will bring back many horses?"

"There will be only the two of us. We go to look, not to fight."

Wolf Eyes became dubious. "What is the use in just looking?"

"So we will know for certain."

"And once we know, what then? Is it good for us, or is it bad, that the white men no longer fight each other?"

Steals the Ponies considered. "I fear it will not be good. If the Texans no longer war against the men of the North, they may make more war against The People. If the ranger society and the long knives make peace with each other, they may join together to fight us."

Wolf Eyes remained disappointed that a pony raid was not to be part of the expedition. "Perhaps if some
teibos
should attack us and we kill them, we may take their horses."

"It is my intention that we see but are not seen. We leave tomorrow, before the sun."

He traveled light on such trips, not wanting to encumber his horse with excess weight. He packed dried meat strips and pemmican in a leather pouch and tested his bowstring to be certain it would not break should the unforeseen force him to use it.

A boy moved up beside him in the firelight. "You are going somewhere, big brother?"

"Not far, Badger Boy. I will not be gone for long."

"Would you take me with you?" Badger Boy was always begging to go somewhere, but he was still too young for any mission that involved danger. He had earned his name by fighting to a standstill all the other boys who tried to pick on him. Steals the Ponies considered Badger Boy an appropriate name because the lad had that animal's unyielding temperament when provoked. He fought with a badger's tenacity.

"Not this time. You must grow some more." Steals the Ponies placed the flat of his hand against the top of the boy's head, then raised it. "When you are this high, then you can go."

The fire blazed up unexpectedly, and Steals the Ponies was reminded that the boy's eyes were much lighter in color than his own. In daylight they were blue. Steals the Ponies had long ago become accustomed to that fact, yet now and again it struck him as if for the first time, reminding him that he and the boy were not of the same blood.

"This is your new brother," Buffalo Caller had said when he brought the young captive home. "Teach him so he will forget the white man's ways.

At the time the boy had been four or perhaps five summers old. Steals the Ponies had resented him. He had beaten him when Buffalo Caller was not there to see. But the boy had fought back with the ferocity of a cornered bear cub, gradually gaining his adoptive brother's respect and eventually his love. Steals the Ponies had become his protector against those who would antagonize him. Badger Boy had grown strong for his age, able to exact a painful price from anyone tempted to taunt him because of his light-colored skin and blue eyes. Seldom anymore did anyone try.

So far as Steals the Ponies could determine, the lad had forgotten his white past, his blood parents, even the white man's language. He was as Comanche-born.

Steals the Ponies said, "I promise that when you are ready I will take you on a raid deep into the white men's country and you will have many horses."

"I am ready now."

* * *

Warily eyeing the horizon for a sign of anyone on horseback, Steals the Ponies rode across what had been the ranger warrior society's camp. The corrals remained as he remembered. He had stolen horses out of them more than once. Now they were empty, the gates sagging open. Where the ranger tepees had stood, he found only square areas of hard-packed earth.

Wolf Eyes suggested, "Perhaps you are mistaken. This may not be the place."

"It is the place. I have taken ponies from this corral while the rangers slept."

The two warriors had made their way here by the light of the moon, skirting the nearby settlement. He had no wish to stir up the white men and set them into pursuit. This was only a mission of discovery. Clearly, the rangers had evacuated the camp. But where had they gone? Surely they had not been killed off, for word would have spread like wildfire sweeping the prairies under a dry west wind. He suspected their removal had something to do with the end of the white men's war, but it was unlikely the rangers had abandoned their war against The People.

The last attempted raid had shamed him in the eyes of the camp. Though outnumbered, rangers had caught the warriors by surprise and routed them ingloriously. He and his followers had been forced back across the river empty-handed, with fewer horses than when they had started. The failure still rankled. Like Wolf Eyes, he itched for redemption. But unlike his companion, he could be patient when patience was called for.

Wolf Eyes suggested, "If the rangers are gone, it will be easier for us. There will be no one to keep us from going among the settlements and taking the farmers' horses."

Steals the Ponies was not so confident. Perhaps the rangers had relocated to a larger camp. If the white men were no longer fighting among themselves, more might choose to join the struggle to drive The People onto the reservation. It appeared obvious that they intended to take over all the old hunting grounds and either violate the earth with their steel-pointed plows or chase off the buffalo and substitute their spotted cattle. Such a thing was a blasphemy too profane to be tolerated.

Wolf Eyes asked, "What do you want to do?"

"We shall find if the rangers have truly left or if they are still somewhere around. You have been telling me you want to take horses. You saw those that graze near the white men's houses?" He pointed in the direction of the settlement that was Fort Belknap.

"There did not seem to be even a guard."

"We shall rest in the timber until night. Then we shall take the horses and see if the rangers come after us. If they do not, we will know they are no longer anywhere near."

"And if they are not?"

"Then when the grass is cured and the moon is full, we shall come back. We shall take all the horses we want and show the hair-faced
teibos
that this land belongs to The People."

I
t had been a long, wearisome walk for Pete Dawkins and his friend Scully. They had quietly taken leave of their company in the middle of the night without bothering to notify the officer in charge. Pete had seen no reason to disturb the captain's sleep. Everybody had been mourning the loss of the war, declaring the Confederacy crushed, complaining that no one was going to be paid what was due him. Pete saw no reason to stay around for formalities or to surrender to some damned Yankee outfit. For all he knew, the defeated Confederate soldiers might be herded into a prison camp. If he had been willing to go to prison he would not have joined the army in the first place.

He and Scully had made a futile effort to liberate two horses from the officers' picket line but had found them too well guarded. He doubted that anyone would be shot for deserting a collapsing army, but they might be shot for trying to get away with someone else's horses. The two had made their getaway afoot, hoping for better luck somewhere along the road. Pete had always felt that luck was not a matter of waiting for something good to happen on its own. A man made his own luck, grabbing whatever came to hand.

"Scully," he said, "do you remember that good little blaze-faced sorrel I had, the one we found just wanderin' around loose on the Tonkawa reservation?"

"I remember it like to've got us scalped."

"I sure wish I had that little horse now." Pete sat down at the side of the dusty wagon road, checking the soles of his shoes. "Got a hole wore almost through. I'd be about as well off barefooted." He removed the offending shoe and rubbed his foot. Its bottom was tender where the leather had worn thinnest.

Bad as they were, the shoes were no worse than the rest of his clothing. What once had been a gray uniform was now only a couple more rips away from being rags, stained, crusted with dried sweat and dirt. The knees were out of his loose-hanging trousers. Missed meals and loss of weight had caused him to punch a new hole in his belt so he could draw it tighter. The cuffs of his tattered shirt flopped open, the buttons gone.

He said, "You'd think somewhere we ought to he able to borry a couple of horses."

"Like we borrowed from the Tonkawas?"

A buyer had come along with genuine Yankee money in his pocket, and Pete had sold the horse. In his estimation it was too good an animal for a blanket Indian anyway. It had also been too good for the buyer, but Pete had been unable to track him and steal the sorrel back, though he tried.

Scully grunted. "Horses seem awful scarce around here. Reckon the war took up all anybody could spare."

"I'd settle for a hog-backed mule if I could get off of my feet for a while."

Pete had worried little about pursuit, even before they crossed out of Louisiana into Texas two days ago. He had seen many Confederate soldiers straggling along the roads, trying to make their way home. Nobody seemed to question whether or not they had deserted their companies. An army had to be fed, and the Confederacy seemed unable to continue doing that. Better that the men scatter and try to take care of themselves. That was Pete's opinion anyway, and lots of Texans seemed to share it. Opinion was about all most of them had left to share.

Pete and Scully had been able to shoot enough game for at least a bare subsistence. True, it was hard to fill up on squirrel, and it became tiresome day after day, but it was better than starving. Yesterday afternoon they had managed to catch a farmer's fat shoat without attracting attention. They had feasted last night on roast pork several miles beyond the farm where the shoat had come from. The meat was gone now, and Pete was hungry again.

"You'd think somebody would take pity on a couple of soldiers who went and done the fightin' for them," he complained. "Ain't nobody offered us nothin'."

"Don't look to me like anybody's got much
to
offer us. This whole country's poor as a whippoorwill."

"Their own damned fault for startin' the war." Pete had no high-flown notions about the glory of the Confederacy. He and Scully had not joined the fight out of loyalty and patriotism. Pete's father, Old Colonel Caleb Dawkins, had given them no real choice after they were caught with stolen horses, some of them his own.

The memory still rankled Pete, still roused him to occasional fits of anger when he let himself dwell upon the old man's grim ultimatum. As an alternative to prison, Caleb Dawkins had sent Pete and Scully to become targets for Yankee guns.

"Redeem yourselves," he had declared. "Expiate your guilt by serving your country."

Pete had developed an elemental survival strategy. Any time the guns sounded, he fell into a ditch or crawled up against protective trees or a stone wall. He would remain there, his head down, until the firing stopped. Be damned if he intended to die for someone else's grand cause. His only loyalty, his only obligation, was to Pete Dawkins.

After resting awhile, the two men resumed their weary westward march. Pete was not sure just where they were, but the wagon road showed every sign of being well used. Surely it must lead to someplace where opportunity awaited a man keen enough to recognize it.