Dead Man's Walk (5 page)

He might walk around Texas until he starved, due to his inability to hit the kind of game they had in Texas. It was skittery game, for the most part--back in Tennessee the deer were almost as docile as cows, and almost as fat. He had killed two or three from the back porch of the old home place, whereas here in Texas, deer hardly let you get within a mile of them.
Gus stopped and listened for a bit. Sometimes the Rangers sang at night--there had been plenty of whooping and dancing the night they drank the mescal. He felt if he listened he might hear Josh Corn's harmonica or some other music. Black Sam sometimes let loose with his darky hymns, when he was in low spirits; Sam had a full voice and could be heard a long way, even when he was singing low.
But when Gus stopped to listen, the plain around him was absolutely silent--so silent that the silence itself rang in his ears; the night was as dark as it was silent, too. Gus could see nothing at all, except intermittently, when the lightning flickered. It was because of the lightning that he had spotted the offensive badger that had managed to affect his nerves.
He took a few steps, and stopped. After all, it wouldn't be night forever, and he had not gone that far from camp. The simplest thing to do would be to wrap up good in his San Antonio serape and sleep for a few hours. With dawn at his back he could be in camp in a few minutes. If he kept walking he might veer off into the great emptiness and never find his way back. The sensible thing to do was wait. He could yell and hope Woodrow Call responded, but Woodrow had been too dull to move off his guard post; he might be too dull to yell back.
The lightning was coming closer, which offered a sort of solution. He could be patient, mark his course, and move from flash to flash. A few sprinkles of rain wet his face. He could tell from the way the sage smelled that a shower was coming--he could even hear the patter of rain not far to the west.
For a moment he squatted, tucking his serape around him--if it was going to turn wet, he was ready.
Then a bold streak of lightning split the sky.
For a moment it lit the prairie, bright as day. And yet Gus saw nothing familiar--no river, no campfire, no chaparral bush, no Call.
No sooner had he wrapped his serape around him and got ready for the rain squall than he was up and walking fast through the sage. He had meant to wait--it was sensible to wait, and yet a feeling had come over him that told him to move. The feeling told him to run, in fact--he was already moving at a rapid trot, though he stopped for a moment to lower the hammer of his pistol. He didn't intend to shoot off his thumb like young Rip Green.
Then he trotted on, just short of a run.
As he trotted, Gus began to realize that he was scared. The feeling that came over him, that brought him to his feet and started him trotting, was fear.
It was such an unexpected and unfamiliar feeling that he had not been able to put a name to it, at first.
Rarely since early childhood had he been afraid. Creaking boards in the old family barn made him think of ghosts, and he had avoided the barn, even to the point of being stropped for a failure to do the chores, when he was small. Since then, though, he had rarely seen anything that he feared. Once in Arkansas he had come across a bear eating a dead horse and had worried a bit; he was unarmed at the time, and was sensible enough to know that he was no match for a bear. But since he had got his growth, he had not encountered much that put real fear in him--just that Arkansas bear.
What had him breathing short and stumbling now was a sense that somebody was near--somebody he couldn't see. When he suggested that the wolf might be an Indian, he had just been joshing Call. He had felt restless, and wanted to take a stroll. If he turned up a gold mine, so much the better.
He didn't seriously expect to kill an Indian, though. He had no desire to stumble onto a Comanche Indian, or any other Indian, just at that time. It had merely been something to twit Call about. He had never seen a Comanche Indian and could not work up enough of a picture of one to know what to expect, but he didn't suppose that a Comanche could be as large as that bear, or as fierce, either.
Now, though, he was driven to trot through the darkness by an overpowering sense that somebody was near, and who could it be but a Comanche Indian? It wasn't Call--being near Call wouldn't scare him. Yet he was near somebody--somebody he didn't want to be near--somebody who meant him harm. Shadrach and Bigfoot claimed to be able to smell Indians, and smell them from a considerable distance, but he didn't have that ability. All he could smell was the wet sage and the damp desert.
It wasn't because he could smell that he knew somebody was near. It was a feeling, and a feeling that came from a part of him he didn't even know he had. What that part told him was run, move, get away, even though the night had now divided itself into two parts, the pitch black part and the brilliantly lit part. The brilliantly lit part, of course, was the lightning flashes, which came more frequently and turned the plain so bright that Gus had to blink his eyes. Even then the light stayed, like a line inside his eye, when the plain turned black again, so black that in his running he stumbled into chaparral and almost fell once when he struck a patch of deep sand.
It was just after the sand that the lightning began to strike so close and so constantly that Gus developed a new fear, which was that his gun barrel would draw the lightning and he would be cooked on the spot. There had been some close lightning three days back, and the Rangers, Bigfoot particularly, had told several stories of men who had been cooked by lightning. Sometimes, according to Bigfoot, the lightning even cooked the horse underneath the man.
Gus would have been willing now to risk getting himself and his horse both cooked, if he could only have a horse underneath him, in order to move faster.
Just as he was thinking that thought, a great lightning bolt struck not fifty yards away, and in that moment of white brightness Gus saw the somebody he had been fearing: the Indian with a great hump of muscle or gristle between his shoulders, a hump so heavy that the man's head bent slightly forward as he sat, like a buffalo's.
Buffalo Hump sat alone, on a robe of some kind--he looked at Gus, with his heavy head bent and his great hump wet from the rain, as if he had been expecting his arrival. He was not more than ten feet away, no farther than the badger had been, and his eyes were like stone.
Buffalo Hump looked at Gus, and then the plain went black. In the blackness Gus ran as he had never run before, right past where the Indian sat. Lightning streaked again but Gus didn't turn for a second look: he ran. Something tore at his leg as he brushed a thornbush, but he didn't slow his speed. In the line inside his eyes where the lightning stayed, there was the Comanche now, the great humpbacked Indian, the most feared man on the frontier. Gus had been so close that he could almost have jumped over the man. For all he knew, Buffalo Hump was following, bent on taking his hair. His only hope was speed.
With such a hump to carry, the man might not be fast.
Gus forgot everything but running. He wanted to get away from the man with the hump--if he could just run all night maybe the Rangers would wake up and come to his aid. He didn't know whether he was running toward the river or away from it.
He didn't know if Buffalo Hump was following, or how close he might be. He just ran, afraid to stop, afraid to yell. He thought of throwing away his gun in order to get a little more speed, but he didn't--he wanted something to shoot with, if he were cornered or brought down.
At the guard post behind the chaparral bush, Call alternated between being irritated and being worried. He was convinced his friend, who had no business leaving in the first place, was out on the plain somewhere, hopelessly lost. There was little hope of finding him before daylight, and then it was sure to be a humiliating business. Shadrach was an excellent tracker and could no doubt follow Gus's trail, but it would cost the troop delay and aggravation.
Major Chevallie might fire Gus--even fire Call, too, for having allowed Gus to wander off. Major Chevallie expected orders to be obeyed, and Call didn't blame him. He might tolerate some wandering on the part of the scouts--that was their job--but he wouldn't necessarily tolerate it on the part of a private.
When the rain came there was not much Call could do but hunch over and get wet. The bush was too thorny to crawl under, and he had no coat. The lightning was bright and the thunder loud, but Call didn't feel fearful, especially. The bright flashes at least allowed him to look around. In one of them he thought he saw a movement; he decided it was the wolf they had heard howling.
It was in another brilliant flash that he saw Gus running. The plain went black again, so black that Call wasn't sure whether he had seen Gus or imagined him. Gus had been tearing along, running dead out. All Call could do was wait for the next flash--when it came he saw Gus again, closer, and in that flash Call saw something else: the Comanche.
The light died so quickly that Call thought he might have imagined the Indian, too. In the light he had seen the great hump, a mass half as large as the weight of most men; and yet the man was running fast after Gus, and had a lance in his hand.
Call fired wildly, in the general direction of the Indian--it was dark again before his gun sounded.
He thought the shot might at least distract the man with the hump. In the next flash, though, Buffalo Hump had stopped and thrown the lance--Call just saw it, splitting the rain, as it flew toward Gus, who was still running flat out--running for his life. Call fired again, with his pistol this time.
Maybe Gus would hear it and take heart--although that was a faint hope. The thunderclaps were so continuous that he scarcely heard the shot himself.
Call raised his rifle, determined to be ready when the next flash came and fit the prairie. But when the flash did come, the plain was empty. Buffalo Hump was gone. The hairs stood up on Call's neck when he failed to see the humpbacked chief. The man had just vanished on an open plain. If he moved that fast he could be anywhere. Call backed into the chaparral, mindless of the thorns, and waited. No man, not even a Comanche, could get through a clump of chaparral and attack him from the rear--certainly no man who had such a hump to carry.
Then he remembered the lance in the air, splitting the rain. He didn't know if it had hit home. If it had, his friend Gus McCrae might be dead. Buffalo Hump might even have run up on him and scalped him, or dragged him off for torture.
The last was such an awful thought that Call couldn't stay crouched in the thornbush. He waited until the next flash--a fair wait, for the storm was passing on to the east, and the lightning was diminishing--and then headed for where he had last seen Gus. Once the thunder quieted a little more, he meant to fire his pistol. Maybe the Rangers would hear it, if Gus couldn't. Maybe they would come to his aid in time to stop the humpbacked Comanche from killing Gus, or dragging him off.
Yet as he waited, Call had the feeling that help, if it came, would come too late.
Probably Gus was already dead. Call had seen the lance in the air--Buffalo Hump didn't look like a man who would let fly with a lance just to miss.
When the flash came, not as bright as before, Call saw that the plain was still empty. He began to walk toward the area where he had seen Gus--it was the direction of camp, anyway. He yelled Gus's name twice, but there was no answer. Again the hair stood up on his neck. Buffalo Hump could be anywhere. He might be crouched behind any sage bush, any clump of chaparral, waiting in the dark for the next unwary Ranger to walk by.
Call didn't intend to be an unwary Ranger--he meant to take every precaution, but what precaution could you take on an empty plain at night with a dangerous Indian somewhere close? He wished that he could have got more instruction from Shadrach or Bigfoot about the best procedure to follow in such situations.
They had fought Indians for years--they would know.
But so far neither of them had said more than two words to him, and those were mostly comments about horseshoeing or some other chore.
The lightning dimmed and dimmed, as the storm moved east. Call could see no trace of Gus, but of course, between the lightning flashes the plain was pitch dark. Gus could be dead and scalped behind any of the sage bushes or clumps of chaparral.
Call walked back and forth for awhile, hoping Gus would hear him and call out. He decided shooting was unwise--if he shot anymore, Major Chevallie might chide him for wasting the ammunition.
Heartsick, sure that his friend was dead, Call began to trudge back to camp. He felt it was mainly his fault that the tragedy had occurred.
He should have fought Gus, if necessary, to keep him at his post. But he hadn't; Gus had walked off, and now all was lost.
It seemed to Call, as he walked back in dejection, that Gus should just have left him in the blacksmith's shop. He didn't know enough to be a Ranger--neither had his friend, and now ignorance had got Gus killed. Call was certain he was dead, too. Gus had a loud voice, louder even than Black Sam's. If he wasn't dead, he would be making noise.
Then, just as he was at the lowest ebb of dejection, Call heard the very voice he had supposed he would never hear again: Gus McCrae's voice, yelling from the camp.
Call ran as hard as he could toward the sound--he came running into camp so fast that Long Bill Coleman nearly shot him for a hostile.
Sure enough, though, there was Gus McCrae, alive and with his pants down. A Comanche lance protruded from his hip. The reason he was yelling was because Bigfoot and Shadrach were trying to pull it out.
The lance was stuck so deep in Gus's hip that Bigfoot and Shadrach together couldn't pull it out.
It was a long, heavy lance--how Gus had managed to run all that way with it dangling from his hip Call couldn't imagine. Gus kept yelling, as the two men tugged at it.
Rip Green tried to steady Gus as the two older men attempted to work the lance out. Rip alone wasn't strong enough--Bob Bascom had to come and help hold Gus in place.
Shadrach soon grew annoyed with Gus's yelling, which was loud.
"Shut off your goddamn bellowing," Shadrach said. "You're yelling loud enough to call every Indian between here and the Cimarron River." "There wasn't but one Indian," Call informed them. "He had a big hump on his back. I seen him." At that news, the whole camp came to attention. Bigfoot and Shadrach ceased their efforts to extract the lance. Major Chevallie had been peering into the darkness, but his head snapped around when Call mentioned the hump.