“Do you know this Ahumado?” Scull asked.
“No,” Famous Shoes said, very startled by the question. They were pursuing Kicking Wolf, not Ahumado.
“No one knows Ahumado,” he added. “I only know where he lives.”
“Somebody must know him,” Scull said. He had begun to think of walking to Mexico, to kill Ahumado, the man who had shot him and also Hector. The thought of a lone strike had only occurred to him that day. Once he had wanted to take cannons to Mexico, to blast Ahumado out of the Yellow Cliffs. But now that he was alone on the prairie, with only the tracker for company, Inish Scull felt that it was time for a turning. Commanding men was a tiresome chore, one he had done long enough. He might do it again, once the great civil conflict came, but now he had the desire to cast off all that had gone before and go into Mexico alone. The remote parts of the world haunted him: Africa, the Arctic, the great peaks of Asia. He didn’t want merely to go back to Austin, to Inez, to the rangers. He wanted an adventure, and one he could pursue alone.
“A military unit is a fine thing when it works,” he said. “But it usually don’t work. A solitary feat of arms is better, if the foe is worthy. This Kicking Wolf ain’t much of a foe, though I grant that he’s a brilliant thief. But I doubt that he’s much of a killer—the two skills don’t go together.”
Famous Shoes didn’t know what to make of that comment. There were plenty of dead Texans and Mexicans and Indians who were dead because of Kicking Wolf—their families considered him killer enough. If Scull wanted to fight someone who killed better than Kicking Wolf, he should not have passed up Buffalo Hump, a man who could kill plenty well.
He didn’t comment. It was night, a good time for napping. If they wanted to catch Kicking Wolf and get the Buffalo Horse back, they would need to be up walking plenty early.
“This fellow Ahumado’s been a notable bandit for a long time,” Scull said. “Somebody must have some information about him.”
Famous Shoes kept quiet. Ahumado was a bad, cruel man; even to talk of him was bad luck. Ahumado worked very bad tortures on the people he caught. In Famous Shoes’ view it was unwise even to think of a man that bad. The old people of Mexico thought Ahumado could pick up thoughts out of the air. If Scull kept talking about him, or even thinking about him, Ahumado might pick the thoughts out of the air and come north looking for them.
Scull fell silent for a while. Famous Shoes was hoping he would nod, and sleep. It was better to sleep a little and then apply themselves to the pursuit of Kicking Wolf than to be talking around a campfire about Ahumado. The smoke of the fire might drift south into Mexico, carrying their thoughts with it. Perhaps Ahumado was so wise that he could find out what people were saying about him just from little whiffs of drifting smoke. It was a new thought—Famous Shoes didn’t know if it was true. But it might be true, which was a good reason to stop talking about Ahumado.
“He might be a man to match me,” Scull said. “Very damn few can match me. I have to seek them out, otherwise the salt might lose its savor.”
“We have to track Kicking Wolf first, and that will take a lot of time,” Famous Shoes said.
Scull had taken his little book out of his pocket, but he didn’t look into it. He merely held it in his hand, as he stared into the fire.
On the plain to the south, two wolves began to howl. One howled and then another answered, which was very disturbing to Famous Shoes. Many coyotes often spoke to one another, but it was rare for two wolves to howl. Famous Shoes didn’t know what it meant, but he didn’t like it. The two wolves should not be speaking to one another, not so early in the night. When he got home he meant to ask the old ones what it meant when two wolves howled early. He would have to seek the old ones—they would surely know.
21.
WHEN CALL FOUND THE DEAD BOY, and the tracks of twenty horses going north, he knew there would not be a simple trek back to Austin. The Indians were not far—piles of horse turds were still warm, and the blood from the boy’s crushed skull had only just coagulated. Call was less than a mile ahead of the troop, scouting. The boy was no more than six years old, skinny and pale, and the raiders who killed him had only just passed. Probably he had been too sickly to travel; they had hit him in the head with a rifle butt and left him, dead or dying.
Call pulled his rifle out of its scabbard and got down to examine the tracks. It was annoying that Scull had taken Famous Shoes—the Kickapoo could have read the tracks easily, told them what band the raiders belonged to, and, probably, how many captives they were carrying into captivity. Call was not so skilled, nor was anyone else in the troop.
He knelt by the dead boy and felt again the weariness that the sight of such quick, casual death raised in him. The boy was barefoot, and so skinny that it seemed he had never had a filling meal in his life; probably he hadn’t. The likelihood was that he had been snatched off some poor farm off one of the several branches of the Brazos, the river that tempted settlement most, due to the fertility of its long, lightly wooded valleys.
When the troop came in sight and saw that Call was dismounted, the rangers spurred up and sped to him, only to stop and stare in silence at the dead boy, the thin line of blood from his broken skull streaking the gray grass.
“Lord, he was just a young ’un,” Long Bill said.
“I just missed the raiding party,” Call said. “I doubt they’re five miles ahead.”
Augustus, whose keen vision was his pride, looked far north and saw the raiding party—they were so far away that they were dots—too far away for him to make a count.
“I expect it was a hundred Indians at least, from all these tracks,” Neely Dickens said, unnerved by the thought that there might be a massive army of Indians nearby.
“I can see them, you fool—there’s not more than twenty,” Augustus said. “And some of them are probably captives.”
“I ain’t a fool and don’t you be cussing me just because you got made a captain,” Neely replied. His pride was easily wounded; when insulted he was apt to respond with a flurry of fisticuffs.
To Augustus’s annoyance Neely looked as if he might be about to flare into the fistfight mode, even though they were in a chancy situation, with major decisions to be made.
“Well, you gave a high count, I’m sorry I bruised your feelings,” Gus said. He realized that he had to watch his comments, now that he had risen in rank. In the old days a man who didn’t appreciate his remarks could take a swing at him—several had—but now that he was a captain, a man who tried to give him a licking might have to be court-martialed, or even hung. Though Neely’s fistfights were ridiculous—Neely was small and had never whipped anybody—Augustus thought it behooved him to be tolerant in the present situation; there were larger issues to be decided than whether Neely Dickens was a fool.
Call was glad Gus had made amends to Neely—it wouldn’t do to have a big silly dispute, with Indians in sight.
“What do we do, Woodrow?” Long Bill asked. “Do we chase the rascals or do we let ’em go?”
The minute he spoke Long Bill wondered if he had done wrong to call Woodrow by his first name. He had known Call for years and always called him merely by his name, but now Woodrow was a captain and Gus too. Was he expected to address both of them as “Captain”? He felt so uncertain that merely speaking to either one of them made him nervous.
“I doubt this boy was the only captive,” Call said. “It’s a large party. They might have his sisters and brothers, if he had any, or even his mother.”
“They probably stole a few horses, too,” Augustus said. “I say we go after them.”
Call saw that Deets already had the dead boy’s grave half dug. Deets had been given a sidearm, but no rifle, when they left Austin. An old pistol with a chipped sight was all he had to defend himself with—it was something Call meant to remedy, once they got home.
“Should we take all the boys, or just the best fighters?” he asked Augustus. That was the most worrisome question, in
his view.
“I guess take ’em all,” Gus said. He was well aware that the men’s fighting abilities varied greatly; still, it was a large party of Indians: the rangers ought to attack with a respectable force.
Call wasn’t so sure. Half the men, at least, would just be in the way, in a running battle. But the complexities of being a captain had begun to present themselves to him forcefully. If they just took the good fighters, who would take care of those who were left? As a group the less able men would be lucky to stay alive, even without Indians. They’d get lost, or hunt badly; they might starve. But if he took them and they got killed or captured, their lives would be on his conscience, and Augustus’s.
Another practical side of captaining was just beginning to worry him, and that was horses. It had been poor grazing lately, and they had had many hard days. None of the horses were in good flesh. The skinniest had suffered as much as the men from the cold, sleety weather. Famous Shoes could have looked at the tracks and told them exactly what kind of condition the Indian horses were in, but he couldn’t do that. However well or poorly the men fought, it would be the quality of their horseflesh that determined the outcome, if there was a long chase. It might be that their horses weren’t a match for the Indian horses, in which case a chase would prove futile.
“What if we can’t catch them? Our horses might be too poorly,” Call asked.
“I don’t know—but we’ve got to try,” Augustus said. “That’s a dead boy we’re burying. We can’t just go home and tell them we found a dead boy and didn’t try to punish the killers, especially since they’re in sight.”
“In your sight—I can’t see them,” Call said, but of course he agreed with the point. The boy was dead. It was the second time in his career that he had stumbled on a dead body, on the prairie—the first, long ago, had been a prospector of some kind. The chance of his finding the two bodies, on the wide plain, struck him—if his route had varied by even fifty yards he might never have seen either body.
The boy, particularly, would have been hard to see, curled up like a young goat in some low grass. Yet Call had found him. It was curious—but there it was.
Neely Dickens, besides being quick to flare up, was also prone to attacks of severe pessimism if an undertaking of a dangerous nature was anticipated. When it became clear that they would all be required to go in pursuit of the raiding party, Neely immediately fell prey to dark forebodings.
“North—I thought we was through going north,” he said. “I despise having to travel back toward the dern north, where it’s so windy.”
“Then why’d you get in the rangers, anyway?” Teddy Beatty asked. “Rangers just go whichever direction they need to. You’re in the wrong profession if you’re picky about directions.”
“Couldn’t get no other job,” Neely admitted. “If I’d known I was going to have to go north I’d have tried to make it to Galveston instead.”
Augustus found the remark puzzling. Why would a fear of the north convince anybody that they ought to go to Galveston?
“Why Galveston, then, Neely?” he asked. The boy’s grave had been hastily covered and the troop was ready to move in the direction Neely despised.
“Ships,” Neely said. “If I was in Galveston I might could hide in a ship.”
“That don’t make no sense,” Long Bill observed. “Ships go north too.”
Neely Dickens was sorry he had ever brought the matter up. All the rangers were looking at him as if he were daft, which he wasn’t. All his life he had heard stories about Comanche tortures. Several of the older rangers had described the practices to him. Comanches slit people open and poured hot coals into them while they were still alive.
“I won’t have no Comanche cutting a hole in my belly and pouring in hot coals,” he said, by way of explanation of his dislike of the northerly direction.
“Shut up that talk—let’s go,” Call said. The men had been blue and apprehensive since Captain Scull left anyway—dwelling on the prospect of torture would only make matters worse. He knew from experience that when morale began to slip among a group of tired, ill-fed, nervous men, a whole troop could soon be put at risk, and he didn’t intend to let that happen, not on his first try at being a captain. He turned his horse and stopped the troop for a moment.
“You need to think about your horses first and foremost,” he said. “Be sure their feet are sound. A lame horse will get you scalped quicker than anything in this country.”
“And be sure to sight your rifles every morning, too,” Augustus added. “Bouncing around all day in a saddle scabbard can throw a gun off sight. If a red warrior forty feet away is about to put an arrow in you, you don’t want to have to stop and fix your sight.”
Teddy Beatty resented such instruction, particularly since the two captains were both younger than he was.
“I can’t think about horses and guns all the time,” he said, in a tone of complaint. “There’s too much time for thinking out here on the plains.”
“Think about whores, then,” Augustus said. “Pretend you won enough money in a card game to buy fifty whores.”
“Buy fifty whores and do what with them?” Long Bill asked. “That’s too many whores to worry with even if I wasn’t a married man—and I am a married man.”
“It’s just something to think about that’s more cheerful than torture,” Augustus explained.
“Survival’s more cheerful than torture,” Call said. “Watch your weapons and your horses and stay close to the group. That way you won’t suffer nothing worse than hearing Gus McCrae talk about whores seven days out of the week.”
Neely Dickens heard the words, but the words didn’t change his opinion. In his view it was hot coals in the belly for sure, if a man lingered too long in the north, in which direction, led by their young captains, they were even then tending. Neely still thought the best plan would be to make for Galveston and hide out in a ship.
22.
MAUDY CLARK only wanted to die—die and have no more freezing, no more outrage, no more having to worry about what Tana, the cruelest of her captors, would do to her at night, when they camped. Tana led the horse she was tied to himself; sometimes, even as they rode, he would drop back to pull her hair or beat her with a mesquite switch. Those torments were minor compared to what Tana and the other three Comanches did to her in camp. She had never expected to have to bear such abuse from men, and yet she still had two living children, Bessie and Dan, and could not allow herself to think too much about the luxury of death.
William, her husband, had been away, driving some stock to Victoria, when the four Comanches burst into her cabin and took her. The babe at her breast, little Sal, they had killed immediately by dashing her head against a log. Eddie, her oldest boy, hurt his leg in the first scuffle—the pain was such that he couldn’t stop whimpering at night. Maudy would hear him crying even as she endured her torments. On the sixth day the Comanches lost patience with his crying and smashed his head in with a gun butt. Eddie was still breathing when they rode on—Maudy prayed someone would find Eddie and save him, but she knew it was an empty prayer. Eddie’s head had been broken; no one could save him even if they found him, and who would find a small dying boy in such emptiness?
But Bessie and Dan, three and five, were still alive. They were hungry and cold, but they had not been hurt, apart from scratches received as the horses crashed through the south Texas brush. Several times, during periods of outrage, Maudy had thought of grabbing a knife and slashing her own throat, but she could not surrender her life while her children needed her. Bessie and Dan had stopped watching what the men did to their mother. They sat with their eyes down, silent, trying to get a little warmth from the campfire. When the men let her tend them, Maudy fed them a few scraps of the deer meat she was allowed. She meant to keep them alive, if she could, until rescue came.
“Pa will be coming—he’ll take us home,” she told them, over and over.
Maudy knew that part was a lie. W
illiam wouldn’t be the one to find them, if they were found and saved. William barely had the competence to raise a small crop and gather a few livestock; he would never be able to follow their trail from the brush country to the empty plains. Besides, he had left home to be gone two weeks or more; he might not yet even realize that his cabin was burned, his baby dead, his pigs scattered, and his family stolen. Once he did discover it, there would be little he could do.
Yet Maudy held on to hope, for Bessie and Dan if not herself. She didn’t know why the young Comanche Tana hated her so, but in his eyes she saw her death. She had seen children brought back from Comanche captivity before, and most recovered. Bessie and Dan were sturdy children; they would recover too. But for herself she had no hope. She and William had discussed the prospect of capture many times; everyone who farmed on the frontier knew women who had been taken. In those discussions William had always firmly instructed Maudy to kill herself rather than submit to savage outrage. There was always a loaded pistol in the cabin, just for that purpose. William hated Indians. His parents and both his brothers had been killed in Indian raids on the Sabine River. More important to William even than the lives of his children was the knowledge that his wife, Maudy, would not be sullied by the embraces of red Comanches.
Maudy knew William was not alone in that feeling. Many men on the frontier made clear to their wives that they would not be accepted back, if they were taken and allowed themselves to survive. Of course, some men wavered and took their wives back anyway; but William Clark had nothing but scorn for such men. A woman who had lain with a Comanche, or any Indian, could not again hope to be a respectable wife.
So Maudy knew she was lost—she had been nursing little Sal when the braves burst in. It was a moment of deep peace, her last. She was caught before she could reach the pistol. That night, when Tana began his outraging, Maudy knew that her life with William Clark was lost and gone. William would not think her worth recovery. Even the children, if they were not brought back quickly, he might disown. But Maudy couldn’t think about that; she had to concentrate on keeping her children alive. She had to see that they got warmth, and food, and that they did not provoke their captors by lagging or crying.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 65
