The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 8

  “I feared it, they’ll get him now, the young fool,” Bigfoot said.

  Zeke was not hurt—he had heard no shot, and supposed his horse had merely stumbled. But the horse didn’t get up—in a moment Zeke realized that the horse was dead. At once he turned, and began to run toward the mountain and the Rangers. But Zeke had scarcely run ten yards before Buffalo Hump loomed behind him, riding a horse whose sides were bloody with Josh Corn’s blood.

  “We better go help him,” Call said, but old Shadrach grabbed his arm before he could move.

  “All this damn helping’s got to stop,” Shadrach said. “We don’t know how many of them are out there. If we don’t stay together there won’t be a man of us left.”

  “There’s no chance for that boy anyway,” the Major said grimly. “I should have shot his horse myself, before he got out of range. That way we could have saved the boy.”

  All the Rangers watched the desperate race helplessly. They saw that what the Major said was true. Ezekiel Moody had no chance. Old Shadrach raised his long rifle in case Buffalo Hump strayed in range, but he didn’t expect it, and he didn’t fire.

  “I hope he remembers what I told him about killing himself,” Bigfoot said. “He’d be better off to stop running and kill himself. It’d be the easiest thing.”

  Ezekiel Moody had the same thought. He was running as fast as his legs could carry him, but when he looked back, he saw that the Indian with the great hump was closing fast. Ezekiel’s heart was beating so hard with fear that he was afraid it might burst. He had just come upon Josh Corn’s body when his horse went down. He had seen the great red cap of blood where Josh’s scalp had been. He had also seen the bloody arrow protruding from Josh’s throat.

  Yet he was afraid to stop running and try to kill himself. He was afraid the Comanche would be on him before he could even get his pistol out. Also, he was getting close enough to the Rangers that one of them might make a lucky shot and hit Buffalo Hump, or turn him. Old Shadrach had been known to make some remarkable shots—maybe if he just kept running one of the Rangers would get off a good long shot.

  Then abruptly Zeke changed his mind and gave up. He stopped and tried to yank out his pistol and shove it against his eyeball, as Bigfoot had instructed. He knew the Indian on the bloody horse was almost on him—he knew he had to be quick.

  But when he got his pistol out, he turned to glance at the charging Indian, and the pistol dropped out of his sweaty hand. Before he could stoop for it the horse and the Indian were there: he had failed; he was caught.

  Buffalo Hump reached down and grabbed the terrified boy by his long black hair. He yanked his horse to a stop, lifted Zeke Moody off his feet, and slashed at his head with a knife, just above the boy’s ears. Then he whirled and raced across the front of the huddled Rangers, dragging Zeke by the hair. As the horse increased its speed, the scalp tore loose and Zeke fell free. Buffalo Hump had whirled again, and held aloft the bloody scalp. Then he turned and rode away slowly, at a walk, to show his contempt for the marksmanship of the Rangers. The bloody scalp he still held high.

  Ezekiel Moody stumbled through the sage and cactus, screaming from the pain of his ripped scalp. So much blood streamed over his eyes that he couldn’t see. He wanted to go back and find his pistol, so he could finish killing himself, but Buffalo Hump had dragged him far from where he had dropped the pistol. He could scarcely see, for blood. Zeke was in too much pain to retrace his steps. All he could do was stumble along, screaming in pain at almost every step.

  Shadrach sighted on the Comanche with the big hump, as Buffalo Hump rode away. Then he raised his barrel a bit before he fired. It was an old buffalo hunter’s trick, but it didn’t work. Buffalo Hump was out of range, and Zeke Moody was scalped and screaming from pain.

  “Ain’t nobody going to go get Zeke?” Matilda asked. The boy’s screams affected her—she had begun to cry. In peaceful times, back in San Antonio, Zeke had sometimes sat and played the harmonica to her.

  “Somebody needs to help that boy, he’s bad hurt,” she said.

  “Matilda, he’ll find his way here—once he gets a little closer we’ll go carry him in,” the Major said. “He oughtn’t to have left the troop—if young Corn hadn’t, he might be alive.”

  The Major was a good deal annoyed by the predicament he found himself in. The scalp hunters had defected, the two captives were lost, one young Ranger was dead, and another disabled; Johnny Carthage had an arrow in his leg that so far nobody had been able to pull out; besides that they had lost two horses, one pack mule, and most of their ammunition. It seemed to him a dismal turn of events. He still had no idea how large a force he faced—the only Indian to show himself was the chief, Buffalo Hump, who had spent the morning having bloody sport at their expense.

  “Well, this is merry,” Bigfoot said. “We’ve been running around like chickens, and Buffalo Hump has been cutting our heads off.”

  “Now, he didn’t cut Zeke’s head off, just his hair,” Bob Bascom corrected. He was of a practical bent and did not approve of inaccurate statements, however amusing they might be.

  “Zeke will have to keep his hat on this winter, I expect,” Bigfoot said. “He’s gonna scare the women, now that he’s been scalped.”

  “He don’t scare me, he’s just a boy,” Matilda said. She was disgusted with the inaction of the men—so disgusted that she started walking out to help Zeke herself.

  “Hold up, Matty, we don’t need you getting killed too,” the Major said.

  Matilda ignored him. She had never liked fat officers, and this one was so fat he had difficulty getting his prod out from under his belly when he visited her. In any case, she had never allowed soldiers, fat or otherwise, to give her orders.

  Call and Gus knelt together, keeping a tight hold on the bridle reins of their two horses. Both of them could see Zeke, whose whole face and body were red.

  “I expect he’ll die from that scalping,” Call said.

  “I didn’t know people had that much blood in them,” Gus said. “I thought we was mostly bone inside.”

  Call didn’t admit it, but he had the same belief; but from what he had seen that morning, it seemed that people were really just sacks of blood with legs and arms stuck on them.

  “Keep close to me,” Gus said. “There might be some more of them sneaking devils around here close.”

  “I am close to you,” Call said, still thinking about the blood. Now and again, working for the old blacksmith, he had cut himself, sometimes deeply, on a saw blade or a knife. But what he had seen in the last few minutes was different. The ground where Josh had been killed was soaked, as if from a red rain. It reminded him of the area behind the butcher stall in San Antonio, where beeves and goats were killed and hung up to drain.

  Now there was Zeke, a healthy man only a few minutes ago, staggering around with his scalp torn off. Call knew that if Buffalo Hump had been a few steps faster when he was chasing Gus, Gus would look like Josh or Zeke.

  In San Antonio every man on the street, whether they were famous Indian fighters like Bigfoot, or just farmers in for supplies, told stories of Indian brutalities—Call had long known in his head that Indian fighting on the raw frontier between the Brazos and the Pecos was bloody and violent. But hearing about it and seeing it were different things. Rangering was supposed to be adventure, but this was not just adventure. This was struggle and death, both violent. Hearing about it and seeing it happen were different things.

  “We’ll have to be watching every minute now,” Gus said. “We can’t just lope off anymore, looking for pigs to shoot. We have to be watching. These Indians are too good at hiding.”

  Call knew it was true. He had glanced over at Josh Corn just as Josh was taking his pants down to shit, and had seen nothing at all that looked worrisome—just a few sage bushes. And yet the same humpbacked Indian who had chased Gus and nearly caught him had been hiding there. Not only that, he had managed to kill Josh and mutilate him without making a sound, with
all the Rangers and Matilda just a few yards away.

  Until that morning Call had never really felt himself to be in danger—not even when he had sat around the campfire and listened to the tortured Mexican scream. The Mexican had been a lone man, whereas they were a Ranger troop. Nobody was going to come into camp and bother them.

  Now it had happened, though—an Indian had come within rock-throwing distance and killed Josh Corn. The same Indian had caught Zeke and scalped him, as quick as Sam, the cook, could wring a chicken’s neck.

  Gus McCrae wished that his churning stomach would just settle. He wasn’t confident of his shooting, anyway—not beyond a certain distance—and he felt he was in a situation that might require him to shoot well, something that would not be easy, not with his stomach heaving and jerking. He wanted to be steady, but he wasn’t.

  Another thing that had begun to weigh on Gus’s mind was that so far he had actually only been able to spot one Indian: Buffalo Hump. When he looked up on the mountain, he couldn’t see the Indians who had shot the arrows down on them, and when he looked across the plain he couldn’t see the Indian or Indians who had shot the Major’s horse, and then Ezekiel’s, too.

  For no reason, just as Gus was feeling as if he might have to dry heave a little bit more, he remembered the conversation Shadrach had had with the Major about the hundreds of Indians that might be coming down to attack Mexico. The thought of hundreds of Comanches, now that he had seen firsthand what one or two could do, was hard to get comfortable with. Their little troop was already down to ten men, assuming that Zeke died of the scalping. It wouldn’t take hundreds of Indians to wipe them out completely. It would only take three or four Indians—maybe less. Buffalo Hump might accomplish it by himself, if he kept at it.

  “How many of them do you think are out there?” he asked Call, who was squeezing the barrel of his rifle so tightly it seemed as if he might be going to squeeze the barrel shut.

  Call was having the same thoughts as his friend. If there were many Comanches out there, they would be lucky if any of the Rangers survived.

  “I ain’t seen but one—him,” Call said. “There must be more, though. Somebody shot those horses.”

  “That ain’t hard shooting,” Gus said. “Anybody can hit a horse.”

  “They shot them while they were running and killed both of them dead,” Call said. “Who says that’s easy? Neither of them horses ever moved.”

  “I expect there’s a passel of killers up on that mountain,” Gus said. “They shot a lot of arrows down on us. You’d think they’d have shot at Matilda. She’s the biggest target.”

  To Call’s mind the remark was an example of his friend’s impractical thinking. Matilda Roberts wasn’t even armed. A sensible fighter would try to disable the armed men first, and then worry about the whores.

  “The ones they ought to try for are Shadrach and Bigfoot,” Call said. “They’re the best fighters.”

  “I aim to give them a good fight, if I can ever spot them,” Gus said, wondering if he could make true on his remark. His stomach was still pretty unsteady.

  “I doubt there’s more than five or six of them out there,” he added, mostly in order to be talking. When he stopped talking he soon fell prey to unpleasant thoughts, such as how it would feel to be scalped, like Zeke was.

  “How would you know there’s only five or six?” Call asked. “There could be a bunch of them down in some gully, and we’d never see them.”

  “If there was a big bunch I expect they’d just come on and kill us,” Gus said.

  “Matilda’s about got Zeke,” Call said.

  When Matilda finally reached the injured boy, he had dropped to his knees and was scrabbling around in the dust, trying to locate his dropped pistol.

  “Here, Zeke—I’m here,” Matilda said. “I’ve come to take you back to camp.”

  “No, I have to find my gun,” Zeke said—he was startled that Matilda had come for him.

  “I got to find it because that big one might come back,” he added. “I’ve got to do what Bigfoot said—poke the gun in my eyeball and shoot, before he comes back.”

  “He won’t come back, Zeke,” Matilda said, trying to lift the wounded boy to his feet. “He’d have taken you with him, if he wanted you.” The sight of the boy’s head made her gag for a moment. She had seen several men shot or knifed in fights, but she had never had to look at a wound as bad as Zeke Moody’s head. His face seemed to have dropped, too—his scalp must have been what held it up.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Matilda said, trying again to lift him up.

  “Let me be, just help me find my pistol,” Zeke said. “I oughtn’t to have run. I ought to have just killed myself, like Bigfoot said. I ought to have just stopped and done it.”

  Matilda caught Zeke under the arms and pulled him up. Once she had him on his feet, he walked fairly well.

  “There ain’t no pistol, Zeke,” she said. “We’ll just get back with the boys. You ain’t dying, either. You just got your head skinned.”

  “No, I can’t stand it, Matty,” Zeke said. “It’s like my head’s on fire. Just shoot me, Matty. Just shoot me.”

  Matilda ignored the boy’s whimperings and pleadings and half walked, half dragged him back toward the troop. When they were about fifty yards from camp young Call came out to help her. He was a willing worker, who had several times helped her with small chores. When he saw Ezekiel Moody’s head, he went white. Gus McCrae came up to assist, and just as he arrived, Zeke passed out, from pain and shock. Bringing him in went easier once they didn’t have to listen to his moans and sobs. All three of them were soon covered with his blood, but they got him into camp and laid him down near Sam, who would have to do whatever doctoring could be done.

  “God amighty!” Long Bill said, when he saw the red smear of Ezekiel’s head.

  Johnny Carthage began to puke, while Bob Bascom walked away on shaky legs. Major Chevallie took one look at the boy’s head and turned away.

  Bigfoot and Shadrach exchanged looks. They both wished the boy had gone on and killed himself. If any of them were to survive, they would need to move fast and move quietly, hard things to manage if you were packing a scalped man.

  Sam squatted down by the boy and swabbed a little of the blood away with a piece of sacking. They had no water to spare—it would take a bucketful to wash such a wound effectively, and they didn’t have a bucketful to spare.

  “We need to give him a hat,” Sam said. “Otherwise the flies will be gettin’ on this wound.”

  “How long will it take him to scab over?” the Major asked.

  Sam looked at the wound again and swabbed off a little more blood.

  “Four or five days—he may die first,” Sam said.

  Shadrach looked across the desert, trying to get some sense of where the Comanches were, and how many they faced. He thought there were three on the mountain, and probably at least three somewhere on the plain. He didn’t think the same warrior killed both horses. He knew there could well be more Indians, though. A little spur of the mountain jutted out to the south, high enough to conceal a considerable party. If they were lucky, there were no more than seven or eight warriors—about the normal size for a Comanche raiding party. If there were many more than that, the Comanches would probably have overrun them when they were strung out in their race to the mountain. At that point they could have been easily divided and picked off.

  “I doubt there’s more than ten,” Bigfoot said. “If there was a big bunch of them our horses would smell their horses—they’d be kicking up dust and snorting.”

  “They don’t need more than ten,” Shadrach said. “That humpback’s with ’em.”

  Bigfoot didn’t answer. He felt he could survive in the wilds as well as the next man, and there was no man he feared; but there were quite a few he respected enough to be cautious of, and Buffalo Hump was certainly one of those. He considered himself a superior plainsman; there wasn’t much country between the Sabine a
nd the Pecos that he didn’t know well, and he had roved north as far as the Arkansas. He thought he knew the country well, and yet he hadn’t spotted the gully where Buffalo Hump hid his horse, before he killed Josh Corn. Nor had he ever seen, or expected to see, a man scalped while he was still alive, though he had heard of one or two incidents of men who had been scalped and lived to tell the tale. In the wilds there were always surprises, always things to learn that you didn’t know.

  Major Chevallie was nervously watching the scouts. He himself had a pounding headache, and a fever to boot. The army life disagreed with his constitution, and being harassed by Comanche Indians disagreed with it even more. Half his troop were either puking or walking unsteady on their feet, whether from fear or bad water he didn’t know. While he was pondering his next move he saw Matilda walking back out into the sage bushes, as unconcerned as if she were walking a street in San Antonio.

  “Here, Matilda, you can’t just wander off—we’re not on a boulevard,” he said.

  “I’m going to get Josh,” Matilda said. “I don’t intend to just leave him there, for the varmints to eat. If somebody will dig a grave while I’m gone I’ll bring Josh back and put him in it.”

  Before she had gone twenty yards the Indians appeared from behind the jutting spur of mountain. There were nine in all, and Buffalo Hump was in the lead.

  Major Chevallie wished for his binoculars, but his binoculars were on the horse that had been killed.

  Several of the Rangers raised their rifles when the Indians came in sight, but Bigfoot yelled at them to hold their fire.

  “You couldn’t hit the dern hill at that distance, much less the Indians,” he said. “Besides, they’re leaving.”

  Sure enough the little group of Indians, led by Buffalo Hump, walked their horses slowly past the front of the Rangers’ position. They were going east, but they were in no hurry. They rode slowly, in the direction of the Pecos. Matilda was more than one hundred yards from camp by that time, looking for Josh Corn’s body, but she didn’t look at the Indians and they didn’t look at her.