“He will come in one hour,” Bes-Das said. “He wants to eat quick. He will leave the camp at sundown. He will bring three wives with him but no braves.”
“Well, that’s rare,” Caleb said. “Does he have any other requests, this chief?”
“Yes,” Bes-Das said. “He wants you to give him a rifle.”.
Caleb chuckled. “A rifle to kill us with,” he said. “I sure hope he likes the cooking, when he tastes it?if he don’t find it tasty he might scalp Sam.”
Black Sam had become Caleb Cobb’s personal cook. The Colonel was so partial to rabbit that Sam had stuffed a cage of fat rabbits into one of the supply wagons. The Colonel didn’t like large game? Sam trapped quail for him, and kept him fed with small, succulent bunnies.
“Well, if he’s coming so soon, the chef will have to hurry,” Caleb said. “Falconer, you like to shoot. Lope down and kill a couple of buffalo calves. Take the liver and sweetmeats and leave the rest. Call and McCrae will escort you?their horses are already used to thebufs.”
Falconer started for the wagon, to get his fine gun, but the Colonel stopped him with an impatient wave.
“You don’t need that damn English gun just to shoot two calves,” he said. “Shoot ‘em with your pistol, or let Corporal Call do it.”
Call was disconcerted, as they rode down to the herd, to see John Kirker following, only a few yards to the rear. Call rode on for a bit and then decided he couldn’t tolerate the man’s presence. He nodded at Gus, and the two of them turned to face the scalp hunter.
“You weren’t told to come,” Call informed Kirker. “I’d prefer it if you’d go back.”
“I don’t work for no army and I won’t be told what to do by no one,” Kirker said. “Caleb Cobb can pretend he’s a colonel if he wants to. He don’t tell me what to do and neither do you, you damn pups.”
“You weren’t told to come,” Call repeated. He was trying to be calm, though he felt his anger rising.
“There’s Indians around buffalo,” Kirker said. “They crawl in with them and shoot from under their bellies. I got business to tend to?I don’t care if that murdering humpback is coming to eat. Get out of my way.”
“Tell him, Captain,” Call said, turning to Falconer, but Falconer ignored the request.
“Last time you rode with us you scalped some Mexicans,” Gus remarked.
Kirker brought the rifle up and looked at them coolly, his thin lip twisted in a kind of sneer.
“I despise young fools,” he said. “If you don’t like my trade have at me and do it now. I might get a scalp before sundown if I’m active.”
Kirker spoke with the same insolence with which he had confronted Bigfoot and Shadrach, back on the Rio Grande.
Gus found the man’s insolence intolerable. To Call’s surprise, he yanked one of the big pistols out of his belt and whacked Kirker right across the forehead with it. The lick made a dull sound?a mule kicking a post made such a sound. Kirker was knocked backward, off his horse. He lay still for a moment, curled on the ground, but his eyes were open.
Call leapt down and took Kirker’s pistol, as the man struggled to his feet. Kirker reached for his big knife, but before he could pull it Call clubbed his arm with his musket?then he clubbed him twice more.
“Whoa, Woodrow,” Gus said, alarmed by the look in Call’s eye and the savage force of his clubbing. He himself had been angry enough to knock Kirker off his horse with a pistol, but the one hard lick satisfied him. The man’s forehead was split open?he was streaming blood. It was enough, at least, to teach him respect. But Woodrow Call had no interest in respect. He was swinging to kill.
“He’s a friend of the Colonel’s?we don’t need to kill him,” Gus said, leaping down, as did black Sam, who had come along to select the cuts. Call swung a third time, at the man’s Adam’s apple?only the fact that Sam grabbed at the barrel and partially broke the force of the swing saved Kirker?even so the man went down again, rolling and clawing at his throat, trying to get air through his windpipe. Gus and Sam together managed to hold Call and keep him from smashing the man’s head with the musket.
Falconer, who didn’t like the scalp hunter either, turned for a moment, to look at the fallen man.
“Disarm him,” he said. “He’s got guns in his boots. If we leave him anything to shoot he’ll try to kill us all, once he gets his wind.”
Call was remembering the filthy, fly-bitten scalps, hanging from the man’s saddle; he also remembered Bigfoot’s contention that some of them were the scalps of Mexican children.
“Don’t be beating nobody to death?not here,” Sam said. “Colonel Cobb, he’ll hang you. He hangs folks all the time.”
With difficulty, Call made himself mount and ride on to the herd. When they left, Kirker was on his knees, spitting blood.
“You yanked that pistol quick,” Falconer said, to Gus. “I think I’ll make you my corporal. You could make a fine pistolero.”
“Thank you, the fellow was rude,” Gus said. “Do you think the Colonel will let me be a corporal?”
Though he didn’t much like Falconer, the man’s words filled him with relief. He felt he had caught up with Call again, in terms of rank. He also felt that he was staunch again, and could fight when a fight was required. The weak feeling that had troubled him since his first glimpse of Buffalo Hump wasn’t there anymore?or at least, not there steadily. He might die, but at least he could fight first, and not simply pass his days shaking at the expectation of slaughter.
They rode on to the herd, quickly shot two fat calves, and took their livers and sweetmeats, as instructed. Sam was deft at the cutting. He had brought a sack to put the meat on, and knotted it deftly once he was finished.
“I’ll kill some big meat tomorrow,” Falconer said, as they rode back toward camp. “Once we get across the river the Colonel won’t mind.”
“These buffalo be gone tomorrow,” Sam said.
“Gone?what do you mean?there’s thousands of them,” Falconer said, in surprise.
“They be gone tomorrow,” Sam said?he did not elaborate.
When they passed the spot where the fight with Kirker had occurred there was no trace of the man, though the grass was spotted with blood from his broken forehead.
“I hope I broke his damn arm, at least,” Call said.
Nobody else said anything for a bit. They rode up to the troop in silence, Sam carefully holding his sack of meat.
“Sam knows where to cut into a buffalo calf,” Gus remarked. “You might give us lessons, next time we have an opportunity. I could slide around on one for an.hour and not know when I had come to the liver.”
“Just watch me, next time,” Sam said. “Buffalo liver tastes mighty good.”
GENERAL PHIL LLOYD, IN his youth one of the heroes of the Battle of New Orleans, was so impressed by the news that Buffalo Hump was coming to supper that he made his manservant, Peedee, scratch around amid his gear until he found a clean coat. It was wrinkled, true, but it wasn’t spotted and stained with tobacco juice, or beef juice, or any of the other substances General Lloyd was apt to dribble on himself in the course of a day’s libations.
“I might be getting dressed up for nothing,” he informed Caleb Cobb. “There’s a hundred men, at least, right here in this camp, who would like to shoot that rascal’s lights out. Why would he come?”
“Oh, he’ll come, Phil,” Caleb Cobb said. “He wants to show off his wives.”
Looking around the camp, Call decided that he agreed with the General. Most of the Rangers, and not a few of the merchants and common travelers, had lost friends or family members to the Comanches; some of the lost ones had died by Buffalo Hump’s own hand. There were mutterings and curses as the time for his arrival approached. Several of the more radical characters were for hanging Caleb Cobb?he ought never to have issued the invitation, many Rangers felt. Sam had to hurry his cooking, but when the smell of the sizzling liver wafted through the camp it added to the general discontent. Why should a killer get to dine on such delicacies, while most of them were making do with tough beef?
“He’ll come,” Gus said. “It would take more than this crowd to scare him away.”
Like Call, he had begun to doubt the competence of the military leadership. General Lloyd, who had been drunk the whole trip and unconscious for most of it, had his servant pin more than a dozen medals on the front of his blue coat.
“He must have won them medals for drinking, he don’t do nothing else,” Gus observed.
