The Searchers (29 page)

“You lie,” she answered, her tone monotonous again, without heat. “All white men lie. Always.”

“Listen! Listen to me! I saw my own mother’s scalp on Scar’s lance—there in the lodge where you live!”

“Lies,” she said, and looked at him sullenly, untouched. “You Long Knives—you are the evil ones. You came in the night, and started killing us. There by the river.”

At first he didn’t know what she was talking about; then he remembered Dead horse Bend and Debbie’s locket that had seemed to tell them she had been there. He wondered if she had seen the old woman cut down, who wore her locket, and the old man sabered, as he tried to save his squaw.

“I saw it all,” she said, as if answering his thought.

Mart changed his tone. “I found your locket,” he said gently. “Do you remember your little locket? Do you remember who gave it to you? So long ago....”

Her eyes faltered for the first time; and for a moment he saw in this alien woman the little girl of the miniature, the child of the shrine in the dream.

“At first—I prayed to you,” she said.

“You what?”

“At first—I cried. Every night. For a long time. I cried to you—come and get me. Take me home. You didn’t come.” Her voice was dead, all feeling washed out of it.

“I’ve come now,” he said.

She shook her head. “These are my people. You— you are Long Knives. We hate you—fight you— always, till we die.”

Amos said sharply, “They’re mounting up now, up there. We got to go.” He came over to them in long, quick strides, and spoke in Comanche, but loudly, as some people speak to foreigners. “You know Yellow Buckle thing?” he demanded, backing his words with signs. “Buckle, Scar wear?”

“The medicine buckle,” she said clearly.

“Get your hands on it. Turn it over. Can you still read? On the back it says white man’s words ‘Ethan to Judith.’ Scratched in the gold. Because Scar tore it off Mart’s mother when he killed and scalped her!”

“Lies,” Debbie repeated in Comanche.

“Look and see for yourself!”

Amos had been trying to work around Debbie, to cut her off from the willows and the river, but she was watching him, moving enough to keep clear. “I go back now,” she said. “To my father’s lodge. I can do nothing here.” Her movements brought her no closer to Mart, but suddenly his nostrils caught the distinct, unmistakable Indian odor, alive, immediate, near. For an instant the unreasoning fear that this smell had brought him, all through his early years, came back with a sickening chill of revulsion. He looked at the girl with horror.

Amos brought him out of it. “Keep your rifle on her, Mart! If she breaks, stun her with the butt!” He swayed forward, then lunged to grab her.

She wasn’t there. She cried out a brief phrase in Comanche as she dodged him, then was into the brush, running like a fox. “Git down!” Amos yelled, and fired his rifle from belt level, though not at her; while simultaneously another rifle fired through the space in which Debbie had stood. Its bullet whipped past Mart’s ear as he flung himself to the ground. The Comanche who had fired on him sprang up, face to the sky, surprisingly close to them, then fell back into the thin grass in which he had hidden.

Dirt jumped in Mart’s face, and a ricochet yowled over. He swiveled on his belt buckle, and snapfired at a wisp of gunsmoke sixty yards away in the brush. He saw a rifle fall and slide clear of the cover. Amos was standing straight up, trading shots with a third sniper. “Got him,” he said, and instantly spun half around, his right leg knocked from under him. A Comanche sprang from an invisible depression less than thirty yards away, and rushed with drawn knife. Mart fired, and the Indian’s legs pumped grotesquely as he fell, sliding him on his face another two yards before he was still. All guns were silent then; and Mart went to Amos.

“Go on, God damn it!” Blood pumped in spurts from a wound just above Amos’ knee. “Ride, you fool! They’re coming down on us!”

The deep thrumming of numberless hoofs upon the prairie turf came to them plainly from a quarter mile away. Mart sliced off a pack strap, and twisted it into a tourniquet. Amos cuffed him heavily alongside the head, pleading desperately. “For God’s sake, Mart, will you ride? Go on! Go on!”

The Comanches weren’t yelling yet, perhaps wouldn’t until they struck. Of all the Wild Tribes, the Comanches were the last to start whooping, the first to come to close grips. Mart took precious seconds more to make an excuse for a ban dage. “Get up here!” he grunted, stubborn to the bitter last; and he lifted Amos.

One of the mules was down, back broken by a bullet never meant for it. It made continual groaning, whistling noises as it clawed out with its fore hoofs, trying to drag up its dead hindquarters. The other mules had stampeded, but the horses still stood, snorting and sidestepping, tied to the ground by their long reins. Mart got Amos across his shoulders, and heaved him bodily into the saddle. “Get your foot in the stirrup! Gimme that!” He took Amos’ rifle, and slung it into the brush. “See can you tie yourself on with the saddle strings as we ride!”

He grabbed his own pony, and made a flying mount as both animals bolted. Sweat ran down Amos’ face; the bullet shock was wearing off, but he rode straight up, his wounded leg dangling free. Mart leaned low on the neck, and his spurs raked deep. Both horses stretched their bellies low to the ground, and dug out for their lives, as the first bullets from the pursuit buzzed over. The slow dusk was closing now. If they could have had another half hour, night would have covered them before they were overtaken.

They didn’t have it. But now the Comanches did another unpredictable, Indian kind of a thing. With their quarry in full view, certain to be flanked and forced to a stand within the mile, the Comanches stopped. Repeated signals passed forward, calling the leaders in; the long straggle of running ponies lost momentum, and sucked back upon itself. The Comanches bunched up, and sat their bareback ponies in a close mass—seemingly in argument.

Things like that had happened before that Mart knew about, though never twice quite the same. Sometimes the horse Indians would fight a brilliant battle, using the fast-breaking cavalry tactics at which they were the best on earth—and seem to be winning; then unexpectedly turn and run. If you asked them later why they ran, they would say they ran because they had fought enough. Pursued, they might turn abruptly and fight again as tenaciously as before—and explain they fought then because they had run enough....

This time they came on again after another twenty-five minutes; or, at least, a picked party of them did. Looking back as he topped a ridge, Mart saw what looked like a string of perhaps ten warriors, barely visible in the last of the light, coming on fast at three miles. He turned at a right angle, covered by the ridge, and loped in the new direction for two miles more. The dusk had blackened to almost solid dark when he dismounted to see what he could do for Amos.

“Never try to guess an Indian,” Amos said thickly, and slumped unconscious. He hung to the side of the horse by the saddle strings he had tied into his belt, until Mart cut him down.

Camp Radziminski was twenty miles away.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Martin Pauley sprawled on a pile of sacked grain in Ranger Captain Sol Clinton’s tent, and waited. With Amos safe under medical care, of sorts, Mart saw a good chance to get some sleep; but the fits and starts of a wakeful doze seemed to be the best he could make of it. The Ranger was still wrangling with Brevet-Colonel Chester C. Greenhill over what they were about to do, if anything at all. He had been over there for two hours, and it ought to be almost enough. When he got back, Mart would hear whether or not five years’ search could succeed, and yet be altogether wasted.

Camp Radziminski was a flattish sag in the hills looking down upon Otter Creek—a place, not an installation. It had been a cavalry outpost, briefly, long ago; and an outfit of Rangers had wintered here once after that. In the deep grass you could still fall over the crumbling footings of mud-and-wattle walls and the precise rows of stones that had bordered military pathways; but the stockaded defenses were long gone.

Mart had been forced to transport Amos on a travois. This contraption was nothing but two long poles dragged from the saddle. The attached horse had shown confusion and some tendency to kick Amos’ head off, but it hadn’t happened. Mart found Radziminski before noon to his own considerable surprise. And the dead Comanche scout was proved to have told the truth with considerable exactness under Amos’ peculiarly effective methods of questioning.

Here were the “more than forty” Rangers, their wagon-sheet beds scattered haphazardly over the best of the flat ground, with a single tent to serve every form of administration and supply. Here, too, were the two short-handed companies of cavalry— about a hundred and twenty men—with a wagon train, an officer’s tent, a noncom’s tent, a supply tent, and a complement of pup tents sheltering two men each. This part of the encampment was incon-veniently placed, the Rangers having been here first; but the lines of tents ran perfectly straight anyway, defying the broken terrain.

And here, scattered up and down the slopes at random, were the brush wickiups of the “sixty or seventy” Tonkawas, almost the last of their breed. These were tall, clean, good-looking Indians, but said to be cannibals, and trusted by few; now come to fight beside the Rangers in a last doomed, expiring effort to win the good will of the white men who had conquered them.

As Mart had suspected, the Army and the Rangers were not working together at all. Colonel Greenhill had not, actually, come out to intercept the Rangers. Hadn’t known they were there. But, having run smack into them, he conceived his next duty to be that of sending them back where they belonged. He had been trying to get this done without too much untowardness for several days; and all concerned were now fit to be tied.

In consequence, Mart found Captain Sol Clinton in no mood to discuss the murder charge hanging over Mart and Amos, by reason of the killings at Lost Mule Creek. From this standpoint, Clinton told Mart, he had been frankly hopeful of never seeing either one of them again. Seeing’s they saw fit to thrust themselves upon him, he supposed he would have to do something technical about them later. But now he had other fish to fry—and by God, they seemed to have brought him the skillet! Come along here, and if you can’t walk any faster than that you can run, can’t you?

He took Mart to Colonel Greenhill who spent an hour questioning him in what seemed a lot like an effort to break his story; and sent him to wait in Clinton’s tent after. Sol Clinton had spoken with restraint while Mart was with them, but as Mart walked away he heard the opening guns of Sol’s argument roar like a blue norther, shaking the tent walls. “I’m sick and tired of war parties murdering the be-Jesus out of Texas families, then skedaddling to hide behind you yellowlegs! What are you fellers running, a damn Wild Indian sanctuary up here? The chief purpose of this here Union is to protect Texas—that’s how
we
understood it! Yonder’s a passel of murderers, complete with Tex-ican scalps and white girl captive! I say it’s up to you to protect us from them varmints by stepping the hell to one side while I—”

They had been at it for a long time, and they were still at it, though with reduced carrying power. Mart dozed a little, but was broad awake instantly as Sergeant Charlie MacCorry came in. Charlie seemed to have worked up to the position of right-hand man, or something, for he had stood around while Captain Clinton first talked to Mart, and he had been in Colonel Greenhill’s tent during Mart’s session there as well. His attitude toward Mart had seemed noncommittal—neither friendly nor stand-offish but quiet, rather, and abstracted. It seemed to Mart an odd and overkindly attitude for a Ranger sergeant to take toward a former prisoner who had slugged him down and got away. And now Charlie seemed to have something he wanted to say to Mart, without knowing how to bring it up. He warmed up by offering his views on the military situation.

“Trouble with the Army,” Charlie had it figured, “there’s always some damn fool don’t get the word, A fort sends some Colonel chasing all over creation after a bunch of hostiles; and he finds ’em, and jumps ’em, and makes
that
bunch a thing of the past; and what does he find out then? Them hostiles was already coming into a different fort under full-agreed truce. Picked ’em off right on the doorstep, by God. Done away with them peaceful Indians all unawares. Well! Now what you got? Investigations— boards—court-martials—and wham! Back goes the Colonel so many files he’s virtually in short pants. Happens every time.”

He paced the tent a few moments, two steps one way, two steps back, watching Mart covertly, as if expecting him to speak.

“Yeah,” Mart said at last.

Charlie seemed freed to say what he had on his mind. “Mart... I got a piece of news.”

“Oh?”

“Me and Laurie—we got married. Just before I left.”

Mart let his eyes drop while he thought it over. There had been a time, and it had gone on for years, when Laurie was always in his mind. She was the only girl he had ever known very well except those in the family. Or perhaps he had never known her, or any girl, at all. He reached for memories that would bring back her meaning to him. Laurie in a pretty dress, with her shoulders bare. Laurie joking about her floursack all-overs that had once read “Steamboat Mills” across her little bottom. Laurie in his arms, promising to come to him in the night...

All that should have mattered to him, but he couldn’t seem to feel it. The whole thing seemed empty, and dried out, without any real substance for him any more. As if it never could have come to anything, no matter what.

“Did you hear me?” Charlie asked. “I say, I married Laurie.”

“Yeah. Good for you. Got yourself a great girl.”

“No hard feelings?”

“No.”

They shook hands, briefly, as they always did; and Charlie changed the subject briskly. “You sure fooled me, scouting up this attack on Scar. I’d have swore that was the last thing you wanted. Unless you got Debbie out of there first. Being’s they’re so liable to brain their captives when they’re jumped. You think they won’t now?”