The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 9

  Call and Gus stood together, watching. They had never before seen a party of Indians on the move. Of course, in San Antonio there were a few town Indians, drunk most of the time. Now and then they saw an Indian of a different type, one who looked capable of wild behavior.

  But even those unruly ones were nothing like what Call and Gus were watching now: a party of fighting Comanches, riding at ease through the country that was theirs. These Comanches were different from any men either of the young Rangers had ever seen. They were wild men, and yet skilled. Buffalo Hump had held a corpse on the back of his racing pony with one hand. He had scalped Zeke Moody without even getting off his horse. They were wild Indians, and it was their land they were riding through. Their rules were not white rules, and their thinking was not white thinking. Just watching them ride away affected young Gus and young Call powerfully. Neither of them spoke until the Comanches were almost out of sight.

  “I’m glad there was just a few of them,” Gus said, finally. “I doubt we could whip ’em if there were many more.”

  “We can’t whip ’em,” Call said.

  Just as he said it, Buffalo Hump stopped, raised the two scalps high once again, and yelled his war cry, which echoed off the hill behind the Rangers.

  Gus, Call, and most of the Rangers raised their guns, and some fired, although the Comanche chief was far out of range.

  “If we was in a fight and it was live or die, I expect we could whip ’em,” Gus said. “If it was live or die I wouldn’t be for dying.”

  “If it was live or die, we’d die,” Call said. What he had seen that morning had stripped him of any confidence he had once had in the Rangers as a fighting force. Perhaps their troop could fight well enough against Mexicans or against white men. But what he had seen of Comanche warfare—and all he had seen, other than the scalping of Zeke Moody, was a brief, lightning-lit glimpse of Buffalo Hump throwing his lance—convinced him not merely in his head but in his gut and even in his bones that they would not have survived a real attack. Bigfoot and Shadrach might have been plainsmen enough to escape, but the rest of them would have died.

  “Any three of them could finish us,” Call said. “That one with the hump could probably do it all by himself, if he had taken a notion to.”

  Gus McCrae didn’t answer. He was scared, and didn’t like the fact one bit. It wasn’t just that he was scared at the moment, it was that he didn’t know that he would ever be anything but scared again. He felt the need to move his bowels—he had been feeling the need for some time—but he was afraid to go. He didn’t want to move more than two or three steps from Call. Josh Corn had just gone a few steps—very few—and now Buffalo Hump was waving his scalp in the air. He was waving Ezekiel’s too, and all Zeke had done was ride a short distance out of camp. Gus was standing almost where Josh had been taken, too. Looking around, he couldn’t see how even a lizard could hide, much less an Indian, and yet Buffalo Hump had hidden there.

  Gus suddenly realized, to his embarrassment, that his knees were knocking. He heard an unusual sound and took a moment or two to figure out that it was the sound of his own knees knocking together. His knees had never done that in his life—they had never even come close. He looked around, hoping no one had noticed, and no one had. The men were all still watching the Comanches. The men were all scared: he could see it. Maybe old Shadrach wasn’t, and maybe Bigfoot wasn’t, but the rest of them were mostly as shaky as he was. Matilda wasn’t, either—she was walking back, the body of Josh Corn in her arms.

  Gus looked at Call, a man his own age. Call should be shaking, just as he was, but Call was just watching the Indians. He may not have been happy with the situation, but he wasn’t shaking. He was looking at the Comanches steadily. He had his gun ready, but mainly he just seemed to be studying the Indians.

  “I don’t like ’em,” Gus said, vehemently. He didn’t like it that there were men who could scare him so badly that he was even afraid to take a shit.

  “I wish we had a cannon,” he said. “I guess they’d leave us alone if we was better armed.”

  “We are better armed than they are,” Call said. “He killed Josh with an arrow and scalped Zeke with a knife. They shot arrows down on us from that hill. If they’d shot rifles I guess they would have killed most of us.”

  “They have at least one gun, though,” Gus then pointed out. “They shot them horses.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if we had ten cannons,” Call said. “We couldn’t even see ’em—how could we hit them? I doubt they’d just stand there watching while we loaded up a cannon and shot at them. They could be halfway to Mexico while we were doing that.”

  The Comanches were just specks in the distance by then.

  “I have never seen no people like them,” Call said. “I didn’t know what wild Indians were like.

  “Those are Comanches,” he added.

  Gus didn’t know what his friend meant. Of course they were Comanches. He didn’t know what answer to make, so he said nothing.

  Once Buffalo Hump and his men were out of sight, the troop relaxed a little—just as they did, a gun went off.

  “Oh God, he done for himself!” Rip Green said.

  Zeke Moody had managed to slip Rip’s pistol out of its holster—then he shot himself. The shot splattered Rip’s pants leg with blood.

  “Oh God, now look,” Rip said. He stooped and tried to wipe the blood off his pants leg with a handful of sand.

  Major Chevallie felt relieved. Travel with the scalped boy would have been slow, and in all likelihood he would have died of infection anyway. Johnny Carthage would be lucky to escape infection himself—Sam had had to cut clean to the bone to get the arrow out. Johnny had yelped loudly while Sam was doing the cutting, but Sam bound the wound well and now Johnny was helping Long Bill scoop out a shallow grave for young Josh.

  “Now you’ll have to dig another,” the Major informed them.

  “Why, they were friends—let ’em bunk together in the hereafter,” Bigfoot said. “It’s too rocky out here to be digging many graves.”

  “It’s not many—just two,” the Major said, and he stuck to his point. The least a fallen warrior deserved, in his view, was a grave to himself.

  When Matilda saw what Zeke had done, she cried. She almost dropped Josh’s body, her big shoulders shook so.

  “Matty’s stout,” Shadrach said, in admiration. “She carried that body nearly five hundred yards.”

  Matilda sobbed throughout the burying and the little ceremony, which consisted of the Major reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Both boys had visited her several times—she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn’t last long, once they became men. Both of them, in her view, deserved better than a shallow grave by a hill beyond the Pecos, a grave that the varmints would not long respect.

  “Do you think Buffalo Hump left?” the Major asked Bigfoot. “Or is he just toying with us?”

  “They’re gone for now,” Bigfoot said. “I don’t expect they’ll interfere with us again, not unless we’re foolish.”

  “Maybe the scalp hunters will kill them,” Long Bill suggested. “Killing Indians is scalp hunters’ work. Kirker and Glanton ought to get busy and do it.”

  “I expect we’d best turn back,” the Major said. “We’ve lost two men, two horses, and that mule.”

  “And the ammunition,” Shadrach reminded him.

  “Yes, I ought to have transferred it,” the Major admitted.

  He sighed, looking west. “I guess we’ll have to mark this road another time,” he said, in a tone of regret.

  The scouts did not comment.

  “Hurrah, we’re going back,” Gus said to Call once the news was announced.

  “If they let us, we are,” Call said. He was looking across the plain where the Comanches had gone, thinking about Buffalo Hump.

  The land before him, which looked so empty, wasn’t. A people were there who knew the emptiness better than he did; they knew it even bett
er than Bigfoot or Shadrach. They knew it and they claimed it. They were the people of the emptiness.

  “I’m glad I seen them,” Call said.

  “I ain’t,” Gus said. “Zeke and Josh are dead, and I nearly was.”

  “I’m still glad I seen them,” Call said.

  That day at dusk, as the troop was making a wary passage eastward, they found the old Comanche woman, wandering in the sage. A notch had been cut in her right nostril.

  Of the tongueless boy there was no sign. When they asked the old woman what became of him she wailed and pointed north, toward the llano. Black Sam helped her up behind him on his mule, and they rode on, slowly, toward the Pecos.

  Part II

  1.

  “WHERE IS SANTA FE?” Call asked, when he first heard that an expedition was being got up to capture it. Gus McCrae had just heard the news, and had come running as fast as he could to inform Call so the two of them could be among the first to join.

  “They say Caleb Cobb’s leading the troop,” Gus said.

  Call was as vague about the name as he had been about the place. Several times, it seemed to him, he had heard people mention a place called Santa Fe, but so far as he could recall, he had not until that moment heard the name Caleb Cobb.

  Gus, who had been painting a saloon when the news reached him, was highly excited, but short on particulars.

  “Why, everybody’s heard of Caleb Cobb,” he said, though in fact the name was new to him as well.

  “No, everybody ain’t, because I ain’t,” Call informed him. “Is he a soldier, or what? I ain’t joining up if I have to work for a soldier again.”

  “I think Caleb Cobb was the man who captured old Santa Anna,” Gus said. “I guess sometimes he soldiers and sometimes he don’t. I’ve heard that he fought Indians with Sam Houston himself.”

  The last assertion was a pure lie, but it was a lie with a serious purpose, and the purpose was to overcome Woodrow Call’s stubborn skepticism and get him in the mood to join the expedition that would soon set out to capture Santa Fe.

  Call had four mules yet to shoe and was not eager for a long palaver. There had been no rangering since the little troop had returned to San Antonio, though he and Gus were still drawing their pay.

  Idleness didn’t suit him; from time to time he still lent old Jesus a hand with the horseshoeing. Gus McCrae rarely did anything except solicit whores; in all likelihood it was a pimp named Redmond Dale, owner of San Antonio’s newest saloon, who had talked Gus into doing the painting—no doubt he had offered free services as an inducement. What time Gus didn’t spend in the whorehouses he usually spent in jail. With no work to do he had developed a tendency to drink liquor, and drinking liquor made him argumentative. The day seldom passed without Gus getting into a fight, the usual result being that he would whip three or four sober citizens and be hauled off to jail. Even when he didn’t actually fight, he yelled or shot off his pistol or generally disturbed the peace.

  “Anyway, we need to join up as soon as we can,” Gus said. “I think we have to go up to Austin to enlist. I sure don’t want to miss this expedition. Would you take them damn horseshoe nails out of your mouth and talk to me?”

  Call had four horseshoe nails in his mouth at the time. To humor his friend he took them out and eased the mule’s hoof back on the ground for a minute.

  “I still don’t know where Santa Fe is,” Call said. “I don’t want to join an expedition unless I know where it’s going.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Gus said, irked by his friend’s habit of asking too many questions.

  “All the Rangers are going,” Gus added. “Long Bill has already left to sign up, and Bob Bascom’s about to leave. Johnny Carthage wants to go bad, but he’s gimpy now—I doubt they’ll take him.”

  The wound from the Comanche arrow had not healed well. One-eyed Johnny could still walk, but he was not speedy and would be at a severe disadvantage if he had to run.

  “I think Santa Fe’s out where we were the first time, only farther,” Call remarked.

  “Well, it could be out that way,” Gus allowed. He was embarrassed to admit that he didn’t know much about the place the great expedition was being got up to capture.

  “Gus, if it’s farther than we went the first time, we’ll never get there,” Call said. “Even if we do get there, what makes you think we can take it?”

  “Why, of course we can take it!” Gus said. “Why are you so damn doubtful?”

  Call shrugged, and picked up the horse’s hoof again.

  “It’s a Mexican town—it’s just defended by Mexicans,” Gus insisted. “Of course we’ll take it, and take it quick. Caleb Cobb wouldn’t let a bunch of Mexicans whip him, I don’t guess!”

  “I might go if I thought there would be somebody with us who could find the place,” Call said. “Is Bigfoot going?”

  “I expect he is—of course he’ll go,” Gus said, though someone had told him that Bigfoot Wallace was off bear hunting.

  “I don’t think you know anything,” Call informed him. “You just heard some talk and now you want to go fight. Santa Fe could be two thousand miles away, for all you know. I ain’t even got a horse that could travel that far.”

  “Oh, they’ll furnish the mounts,” Gus said. “They say there’s silver and gold piled everywhere in Santa Fe. I expect we can pick up enough just walking around to buy ourselves fifty horses.”

  “You’d believe anything,” Call said. “What about Buffalo Hump? If Santa Fe’s in his direction, he’ll find us and kill us all.”

  “I don’t expect he’d care if we took Santa Fe,” Gus said, though he knew it was a weak comment. The thought of Buffalo Hump cast a chill on his enthusiasm. Capturing Santa Fe and picking up gold and silver off the ground were fine prospects, but if it involved crossing the Comancheria, as probably it did, then the whole matter had a side to it that was a good deal less pleasant. Since returning with the troop, he and Call had not been more than a few miles out of town—once or twice they had gone a little distance into the hills to hunt pigs or turkeys, but they did not camp out. The week scarcely passed without the Indians picking off some traveler, often almost in the outskirts of town. When they went out to hunt, they went in a group and took care to be heavily armed. Gus wore two pistols now, unless he was just engaged in light work such as painting saloons. He had not forgotten what happened west of the Pecos—time and time again, in his dreams, he had seen Buffalo Hump. He remembered that Zeke Moody had dropped his pistol and been scalped alive, as a result. He carried two so that if he got nervous and dropped one, he would still have a spare.

  One of his friend Woodrow’s most annoying traits was that he kept producing information you didn’t want.

  “I’ve heard that some of the army’s coming on this expedition,” he said. “I doubt the Indians would want to interfere with us if we’ve got the army along.”

  “Buffalo Hump has an army, too,” Call reminded his excitable friend. “If he can find ten warriors to ride with him, then he’s got an army.

  “Besides, he lives there,” he added. “He’s got his whole people. I expect he’ll interfere with us plenty, if we try to cross his country.”

  “Damn it, ain’t you coming?” Gus asked, exasperated by his friend’s contrariness. “Wouldn’t you rather be riding out on an expedition than staying around here shoeing mules?”

  “I might go if we have enough of a troop,” Call said. “I’d like to know more about this man you named—what was he called?”

  “Caleb Cobb—he’s the man who captured Santa Anna,” Gus said. He didn’t know that Caleb Cobb had done anything of the sort, but he wanted to pile on as many heroics as he could. Maybe it would get Woodrow Call in the mood to travel.

  “They say there’s enough gold lying around in Santa Fe to fill two churches,” Gus said, piling it on a little more.

  “Why would the Mexicans just give us two churches full of gold? It don’t sound like any Mexicans I’ve met,
” Call said.

  Though not unwilling to consider an adventure—shoeing mules was a long way from being his favorite occupation; it was mainly something he did to help old Jesus, who had been kind to him when he first came to San Antonio—the one Gus McCrae was describing seemed pretty unlikely. He would be trying to reach a town he had never heard of, led by a man he had never heard of, either. Who would command the Rangers, if the Rangers went as a troop, he didn’t know, but it wouldn’t be Major Randall Chevallie, because Major Chevallie had died of a fever not three weeks after returning from the failed expedition to El Paso. They had got into some wet weather on their return—also, they had traveled hard. Major Chevallie took to his bed for a day or two, got worse, died, and was buried before anyone had time to think much about it.

  “You’re too damn contrary,” Gus said. “I’ve never known a person more apt to take the opposite view than you—you’re too damn gripy.”

  “I expect I’ve spent too much time with mules,” Call said. “When would we be to leave, if we go?”

  “What’s wrong with now?” Gus asked. “The expedition’s leaving any day—I sure don’t want to get left. We’d be rich for life if we could pick up a little of that gold and silver.”

  “I hope we can whip the Mexicans, if we get there,” Call said.

  “Why wouldn’t we, you fool?” Gus asked.

  “We didn’t whip ’em at the Alamo,” Call reminded him. “We might get out there on the plains somewhere and starve—that’s another thing to think about. We could barely find grub for twelve men when we were out on the Pecos. How will we feed an army?

  “There ain’t much water out that way, neither,” Call added, before Gus could break in with a few more lies about the gold to be picked up in Santa Fe.

  “Why, we’ll be going across the plains—it’s plenty wet up that way,” Gus said.

  “You could shoe one of these mules if you don’t have anything else to do,” Call suggested. “Once we get these mules shoed I might be more interested in capturing Santa Fe.”