Call. The little family had built it, with much labor, in the clearing, sheltered in it, worked and planted their crops. Then, in an hour or less, it was all destroyed: four of them dead, one girl captured, the cabin burnt. Even the milk cow was dead, shot full of arrows. The cow was bloated now, its legs sticking up in the air.
Call did his best with the bodies, but when it came to the woman, he had to ask Blackie Slidell for help. Blackie had to take her feet and Call her arms before they could pull her free, so deep was Buffalo Hump’s arrow in the ground. Call had butchered several goats and a sheep or two, when he worked for Jesus?the woman he was trying to wrap in a wet, mouldy sheet had been butchered, just like a sheep.
“Lord, I hope we can whip ‘em if we catch up to them,” Blackie said, in a shaky voice. “I don’t want one of them devils catching me.”
Long Bill came over and helped Call with the graves. “I’ll help? I’d rather be working than thinking,” he said.
They scooped out four shallow graves, rolled the bodies in them, and covered them with rocks from the little rock fence the family had been building.
“They won’t need no fence now,” Rip Green observed. “All that work, and now they’re dead.”
Before they had quite finished the burying, Bigfoot and Shadrach came loping back. Bigfoot had the body of a dead girl across his horse.
“Here’s the last one?bury her,” Bigfoot said, easing the body down to Call. “The mule went lame a few miles from here. I guess they didn’t have no horse to spare for this girl. They brained her and shot the mule.”
A little later, as the troop was riding north, they passed the dead mule. A big piece had been cut out of its haunch.
“Shadrach done that,” Bigfoot said. “He says the game’s poorly this year, and it was a fat mule.”
They rode north all day, into a broken country of limestone hills. It rained intermittently, the clouds low. In the distance, some of the clouds rested on the low hills, like caps. Now and again Shadrach or Bigfoot rode off in one direction or another, but never for long. In the afternoon, they stopped and cooked the mule meat. Shadrach cut the haunch into little strips and gave each man one, to cook as preferred. Call stuck his on a stick and held it over the fire until it was black. He had never planned to eat mule and didn’t expect to like the taste, but to his surprise the meat was succulent?it tasted fine.
“When will we catch ‘em?” he asked Bigfoot at one point. They had not seen a trace of the Comanches?yet for all he knew, they were close, in one of the rocky valleys between the hills. Several times, as they rode north, he kept his eyes to the ground, trying to make out the track that the troop was following. But all he saw was the ground. He would have liked to know what clues the two scouts picked up to guide the chase, but no one offered to inform him. He was reluctant to ask?it made him seem too ignorant. But in fact he was ignorant, and not happy about it. At least Shadrach had taught him how to identify Buffalo Hump’s arrow?he thought he could recognize the feathers again, if he saw them. That was the only piece of instruction to come his way, though.
When he asked Bigfoot when he thought they would catch up with the Comanches, Bigfoot looked thoughtful for a moment.
“We won’t catch them,” he said.
Call was puzzled. If the Rangers weren’t going to catch the enemy, why were they pursuing them at all?
Bigfoot’s manner did not invite more questions. He had been eager, back on the Rio Grande, to talk about the finer points of suicide, but when it came to their pursuit of the Comanche raiding party, he was not forthcoming. Call rode on in silence for a few miles, and then tried again.
“If we ain’t going to catch them, why are we chasing them?” he asked.
“Oh, I just meant we can’t outrun them,” Bigfoot said. “They can travel faster than we can. But we might catch ‘em anyway.”
“How?” Call asked, confused.
“There’s only one way to catch an Indian, which is to wait for him to stop,” Bigfoot said. “Once they get across the Brazos they’ll feel a little safer. They might stop.”
“And then we’ll kill them?” Call said?he thought he understood now.
“Then we’ll try,” Bigfoot said.
To Gus’s DISMAY, THE order to move out of Austin came at three in the morning. Captain Falconer rode through the camps on a snorting, prancing horse, telling the men to get their gear.
“Colonel Cobb’s ready,” he informed them. “No lingering. We’ll be leaving town at dawn.”
“Dern, it’s the middle of the night,” Johnny Carthage said. Though he had been provided with two mules and a heavy cart, he had as yet totally neglected his instructions in regard to packing. Instead, he and Gus had got drunk. Nothing was packed, and it was raining and pitch dark.
Gus’s preparations for the grand expedition to Santa Fe consisted in dragging himself, his guns, and a blanket into the heavy cart. Then he huddled in the cart, so drunk that he was not much bothered by the fact that Johnny Carthage was pitching every object he could get his hands on in on top of him. The cooking pots, the extra saddlery, blankets and guns, ropes and boxes of medicines, were all heaped in the cart, with little care taken as to placement.
“Why do we have to leave in the middle of the night?” Gus asked, several times?but Johnny Carthage was muttering and coughing; he made no reply. He had an old lantern, and was searching all around the large area of the camp, well aware that he would be blamed if he left anything behind. But with only one eye and a gimpy leg, and with Gus too crippled and too drunk to help, gathering up the belongings of the whole troop on a dark, rainy night was chancy work.
At some point well before dawn, Quartermaster Brognoli made a tour of the area, to see that the fifteen or twenty different groups of free-ranging adventurers, many of them merchants or would-be merchants, were making adequate progress toward departure. Gus stuck his head out from under a dripping blanket long enough to talk to him a minute.
“Why leave when it’s dark?” he asked. “Why not wait for sunup?”
Brognoli had taken a liking to the tall boy from Tennessee. He was green but friendly, and he moved quick. Years of trying to get soldiers on the move had given Brognoli a distaste for slow people.
“Colonel Cobb don’t care for light nor dark,” he informed Gus. “He don’t care for the time of day or the month or the year. When he decides to go, we go.”
“But three in the morning’s an odd time to start an expedition,” Gus pointed out.
“No, it’s regular enough,” Brognoli said. “If we start pushing out about three the stragglers will clear Austin by six or seven. Colonel Cobb left an hour ago. We’re going to stop at Bushy Creek for breakfast, so we better get moving. If we ain’t there when the Colonel expects us, there won’t be no breakfast.”
The mules were hitched, and the cart with all the Rangers’ possessions in it was moving through the center of Austin when Gus McCrae suddenly remembered Clara Forsythe. More than thirty wagons, small herds of sheep and beef cattle, and over a hundred horsemen of all ages and degrees of ability were jostling for position in the crowded streets. Some of the mule skinners had lanterns, but most didn’t. There were several collisions and much cursing. Once or twice, guns were fired. Occasional lightning lit the western sky? the faint grey of a cloudy dawn was just visible to the east.
The reason Gus remembered Clara was that the little cart, driven by a wet, tired, apprehensive Johnny Carthage, happened to passright in front of the general store. Gus suddenly recalled that the pretty young woman he had such a desire to marry had been meaning to come and rub liniment on his wounded ankle sometime during the day that was just dawning. He had been drinking for quite a few hours?most of the hours since he fell off the bluff, in fact?and had reached such a depth of drunkness that he had temporarily forgotten the most important fact of all: Clara, his future wife.
“Stop, I got to see her!” he told Johnny, who was urging the mules through a sizable patch of mud, while at the same time trying to avoid colliding with the wagon containing the comatose General Lloyd. He knew it was General Lloyd’s wagon because a kind of small tent had been erected in it so the General could be protected from the elements while he drank and snoozed.
“What?” Johnny Carthage asked.
“Stop, goddamn you?stop!” Gus demanded. “I’ve got business in the general store.”
“But it ain’t open,” Johnny protested. “If I stop now we’ll never get out of this mud.”
“Stop or I’ll strangle you, damn you!” Gus said. It was not a threat he had ever made before, but he was so desperate to see Clara that he felt he could carry it out. Johnny Carthage didn’t hear it, though ?one of the mules
