Authors: Alan LeMay
After that there was a letup, while the Comanches broke circle and drew off. Out in front of the cowmen lay three downed ponies, two dead Comanches, and two live ones, safe and dangerous behind their fallen horses. Amos was swearing softly and steadily to himself. Charlie MacCorry said he thought he goosed one of them up a little bit, maybe, but didn’t believe he convinced him.
“Good God almighty,” Brad Mathison broke out, “there’s got to be some way to do this!”
Mose Harper scratched his beard and said he thought they done just fine that trip. “Oncet when I was a little shaver, with my pa’s bull wagons, a couple hundred of ’em circled us all day long. We never did get ’em whittled down very much. They just fin’y went away.... You glued to the ground, Zack? Take care that horse!”
Zack got up and took a look at his wounded horse, but didn’t seem to know what to do. He stood staring at it, until his father walked across and shot it.
Mart said to Amos. “Tell me one thing. Was they hollering like that the time they killed my folks?”
Amos seemed to have to think that over. “I wasn’t there,” he said at last. “I suppose so. Hard to get used to, ain’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Mart said shakily, “if I’ll ever be able to get used to it.”
Amos looked at him oddly for some moments. “Don’t you let it stop you,” he said.
“It won’t stop me.”
They came on again, and this time they swept past at no more than ten yards. A number of the wounded Comanche ponies lagged back to the tail of the line, their riders saving them for the final spurt, but they were still in action. The Comanches made this run in close bunches; the attack became a smother of confusion. Both lead and arrows poured fast into the cowmen’s position.
Zack whimpered, “My God—there’s a million of ’em!” and ducked down behind his dead horse.
“Git your damn head up!” Mose yelled at his son. “Fire into ’em!” Zack raised up and went to fighting again.
Sometime during this run Ed Newby’s horse fell, pinning Ed under it, but they had no time to go to him while this burst of the attack continued. An unhorsed Comanche came screaming at Amos with clubbed rifle, and so found his finish. Another stopped at least five bullets as a compadre tried to rescue him in a flying pickup. There should have been another; a third pony was down out in front of them, but nobody knew where the rider had got to. This time as they finished the run the Comanches pulled off again to talk it over.
All choices lay with the Comanches for the time being. The cowmen got their backs into the job of getting nine hundred pounds of horse off Ed Newby. Mose Harper said, “How come you let him catch you, Ed?”
Ed Newby answered through set teeth. “They got my leg—just as he come down—”
Ed’s leg was not only bullet-broken, but had doubled under him, and got smashed again by the killed horse. Amos put the shaft of an arrow between Ed’s teeth, and the arrowwood splintered as two men put their weight into pulling the leg straight.
A party of a dozen Comanches, mounted on the fastest of the Indian ponies, split off from the main bunch and circled out for still another sweep.
“Hold your fire,” Amos ordered. “You hear me? Take cover—but let ’em be!”
Zack Harper, who had fought none too well, chose this moment to harden. “Hold hell! I aim to get me another!”
“You fire and I’ll kill you,” Amos promised him; and Zack put his rifle down.
Most took to the ground as the Comanches swept past once more, but Amos stood up, watching from under his heavy brows, like a staring ox. The Indians did not attack. They picked up their dismounted and their dead; then they were gone.
“Get them horses up!” Amos loosed the pigging string and got his own horse to its feet.
“They’ll scatter now,” Mose Harper said.
“Not till they come up with their horse herd, they won’t!”
“Somebody’s got to stay with Ed,” Mose reminded them. “I suppose I’m the one to do that— old crip that I be. But some of them Comanch’ might circle back. You’ll have to leave Zack with me.”
“That’s all right.”
“And I need one fast man on a good horse to get me help. I can’t move him. Not with what we got here.”
“We all ought to be back,” Amos objected, “in a couple of days.”
“Fellers follering Comanches don’t necessarily ever come back. I got to have either Brad Mathison or Charlie MacCorry.”
“You get Mathison, then,” Charlie said. “I’m going on.”
Brad whirled on Charlie in an unexpected blast of temper. “There’s a quick way to decide it,” he said, and stood braced, his open hand ready above his holster.
Charlie MacCorry looked Brad in the eye as he spat at Brad’s boots and missed. But after that he turned away.
So three rode on, following a plume of dust already distant upon the prairie. “We’ll have the answer soon,” Amos promised. “Soon. We don’t dast let ’em lose us now.”
Mart Pauley was silent. He didn’t want to ask him what three riders could do when they caught up with the Comanches. He was afraid Amos didn’t know.
They kept the feather of dust in sight all day, but in the morning, after a night camp without water, they failed to pick it up. The trail of the Comanche war party still led westward, broad and plain, marked at intervals with the carcasses of buffalo ponies wounded at the Cat-tails. They pushed on, getting all they could out of their horses.
This day, the second after the Fight at the Cat-tails, became the strangest day of the pursuit before it was done, because of something unexplained that happened during a period while they were separated.
A line of low hills, many hours away beyond the plain, began to shove up from the horizon as they rode. After a while they knew the Comanches they followed were already into that broken country where pursuit would be slower and more treacherous than before.
“Sometimes it seems to me,” Amos said, “them Comanches fly with their elbows, carrying the pony along between their knees. You can nurse a horse along till he falls and dies, and you walk on carrying your saddle. Then a Comanche comes along, and gets that horse up, and rides it twenty miles more. Then eats it.”
“Don’t we have any chance at all?”
“Yes.... We got a chance.” Amos went through the motions of spitting, with no moisture in his mouth to spit. “And I’ll tell you what it be. An Indian will chase a thing until he thinks he’s chased it enough. Then he quits. So the same when he runs. After while he figures we must have quit, and he starts to loaf. Seemingly he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter that might just keep coming on.”
As he looked at Amos, sitting his saddle like a great lump of rock—yet a lump that was somehow of one piece with the horse—Mart Pauley was willing to believe that to have Amos following you could be a deadly thing with no end to it, ever, until he was dead.
“If only they stay bunched,” Amos finished, and it was a prayer; “if only they don’t split and scatter... we’ll come up to ’em. We’re bound to come up.
Late in the morning they came to a shallow sink, where a number of posthole wells had been freshly dug among the dry reeds. Here the trail of the main horse herd freshened, and they found the bones of an eaten horse, polished shiny in a night by the wolves. And there was the Indian smell, giving Mart a senseless dread to fight off during their first minutes in this place.
“Here’s where the rest of ’em was all day yesterday,” Amos said when he had wet his mouth; “the horse guards, and the stole horses, and maybe some crips Henry shot up. And our people—if they’re still alive.”
Brad Mathison was prone at a pothole, dipping water into himself with his tin cup, but he dropped the cup to come up with a snap. As he spoke, Mart Pauley heard the same soft tones Brad’s father used when he neared an end of words. “I’ve heard thee say that times enough,” Brad said.
“What?” Amos asked, astonished.
“Maybe she’s dead,” Brad said, his bloodshot blue eyes burning steadily into Amos’ face. “Maybe they’re both dead. But if I hear it from thee again, thee has chosen me—so help me God!”
Amos stared at Brad mildly, and when he spoke again it was to Mart Pauley. “They’ve took an awful big lead. Them we fought at the Cat-tails must have got here early last night.”
“And the whole bunch pulled out the same hour,” Mart finished it.
It meant they were nine or ten hours back—and every one of the Comanches was now riding a rested animal. Only one answer to that—such as it was: They had to rest their own horses, whether they could spare time for it or not. They spent an hour dipping water into their hats; the ponies could not reach the little water in the bottom of the post-hole wells. When one hole after another had been dipped dry they could only wait for the slow seepage to bring in another cupful, while the horses stood by. After that they took yet another hour to let the horses crop the scant bunch grass, helping them by piling grass they cut with their knives. A great amount of this work gained only the slightest advantage, but none of them begrudged it.
Then, some hours beyond the posthole wells, they came to a vast sheet of rock, as flat and naked as it had been laid down when the world was made. Here the trail ended, for unshod hoofs left no mark on the barren stone. Amos remembered this reef in the plain. He believed it to be about four miles across by maybe eight or nine miles long, as nearly as he could recall. All they could do was split up and circle the whole ledge to find where the trail came off the rock.
Mart Pauley, whose horse seemed the worst beat out, was sent straight across. On the far side he was to wait, grazing within sight of the ledge, until one of the others came around to him; then both were to ride to meet the third.
Thus they separated. It was while they were apart, each rider alone with his tiring horse, that some strange thing happened to Amos, so that he became a mystery in himself throughout their last twenty-four hours together.
Brad Mathison was first to get around the rock sheet to where Mart Pauley was grazing his horse. Mart had been there many hours, yet they rode south a long way before they sighted Amos, waiting for them far out on the plain.
“Hasn’t made much distance, has he?” Brad commented.
“Maybe the rock slick stretches a far piece down this way.”
“Don’t look like it to me.”
Mart didn’t say anything more. He could see for himself that the reef ended in a couple of miles.
Amos pointed to a far-off landmark as they came up. “The trail cuts around that hump,” he said, and led the way. The trail was where Amos had said it would be, a great welter of horse prints already blurred by the wind. But no other horse had been along here since the Comanches passed long before.
“Kind of thought to see your tracks here,” Brad said.
“Didn’t come this far.”
Then where the hell had he been all this time? If it had been Lije Powers, Mart would have known he had sneaked himself a nap. “You lost a bed blanket,” Mart noticed.
“Slipped out of the strings somewhere. I sure ain’t going back for it now.” Amos was speaking too carefully. He put Mart in mind of a man half stopped in a fist fight, making out he was unhurt so his opponent wouldn’t know, and finish him.
“You feel all right?” he asked Amos.
“Sure. I feel fine.” Amos forced a smile, and this was a mistake, for he didn’t look to be smiling. He looked as if he had been kicked in the face. Mart tried to think of an excuse to lay a hand on him, to see if he had a fever; but before he could think of anything Amos took off his hat and wiped sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. That settled that. A man doesn’t sweat with the fever on him.
“You look like you et something,” Mart said.
“Don’t know what it could have been. Oh, I did come on three-four rattlesnakes.” Seemingly the thought made Amos hungry. He got out a leaf of jerky, and tore strips from it with his teeth.
“You sure you feel—”
Amos blew up, and yelled at him. “I’m all right, I tell you!” He quirted his horse, and loped out ahead.
They off-saddled in the shelter of the hump. A northering wind came up when the sun was gone; its bite reminded them that they had been riding deep into the fall of the year. They huddled against their saddles, and chewed corn meal. Brad walked across and stood over Amos. He spoke reasonably.
“Looks like you ought to tell us, Mr. Edwards.” He waited, but Amos didn’t answer him. “Something happened while you was gone from us today. Was you laid for? We didn’t hear no guns, but... Be you hiding an arrow hole from us by any chance?”
“No,” Amos said. “There wasn’t nothing like that.”
Brad went back to his saddle and sat down. Mart laid his bedroll flat, hanging on by the upwind edge, and rolled himself up in it, coming out so that his head was on the saddle.
“A man has to learn to forgive himself,” Amos said, his voice unnaturally gentle. He seemed to be talking to Brad Mathison. “Or he can’t stand to live. It so happens we be Texans. We took a reachin’ holt, way far out, past where any man has right or reason to hold on. Or if we didn’t, our folks did, so we can’t leave off, without giving up that they were fools, wasting their lives, and washed in the way they died.”
The chill striking up through Mart’s blankets made him homesick for the Edwards’ kitchen, like it was on winter nights, all warm and light, and full of good smells, like baking bread. And their people— Mart had taken them for granted, largely; just a family, people living alone together, such as you never thought about, especially, unless you got mad at them. He had never known they were dear to him until the whole thing was busted up forever. He wished Amos would shut up.
“This is a rough country,” Amos was saying. “It’s a country knows how to scour a human man right off the face of itself. A Texan is nothing but a human man way out on a limb. This year, and next year, and maybe for a hundred more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever. Someday this country will be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.”
Mart was thinking of Laurie now. He saw her in a bright warm kitchen like the Edwards’, and he thought how wonderful it would be living in the same house with Laurie, in the same bed. But he was on the empty prairie without any fire—and he had bedded himself on a sharp rock, he noticed now.