find waterholes. On foot they might stumble for days, or until they dropped, looking for water. Caleb Cobb was still very angry over the loss of his dog. He sat on the edge of the canyon, his legs dangling, saying nothing to nobody. The men were afraid to approach him, and yet they all knew that a decision had to be made soon. They couldn’t just sit where they were, with no food and almost no water?some of the men had canteens, but many didn’t. Many had relied on leather pouches, which had burnt or burst in the fire.
Finally, after three hours, Caleb stood up.
“Well, we’re no worse off than old Coronado,” he said, and started walking west. The men followed slowly, afraid of scorching themselves. The plain was dotted with wands of smoke, drifting upward from smouldering plants. Call was not far behind Caleb? he saw Caleb reach down and pick up a charred jackrabbit that had been crisped coming out of its hole. Caleb pulled a patch of burned skin off the rabbit and ate a few bites of rabbit meat, as he walked. Looking back, he noticed that Call was startled. “We’re going to have to eat anything we can scratch up now, Corporal,” he said. “You better be looking for a rabbit yourself.”
Not ten minutes later, Call saw another dead rabbit. He picked it up by its leg and carried it with him?he did not feel hungry enough to eat a scorched rabbit; not yet. Gus, still weak from his scare, saw him pick it up.
“What’s the jackrabbit for?” he asked.
“It’s to eat,” Call said. “The Colonel ate one. He says we have to eat anything we can find, now. It’s a long way to where we can get grub.”
“I mean to find something better than a damn rabbit,” Gus said. “I might find a deer or an antelope, if I look hard.”
“You better take what you can get!” Bigfoot advised. “I’m looking for a burnt polecat, myself. Polecat meat is tastier than rabbit.”
A little later he came upon five dead horses; evidently they had run into a wall of fire and died together. Call’s little bay was one of them?remembering how the horse had towed him across the Brazos made him sad; even sadder was the fact that the charred ground ended only a hundred yards from where the horses lay. A little more speed, or a shift in the wind, and they might have made it through.“Why are we walking off from this meat?” Shadrach asked. He wore moccasins?the passage through the hot plains had been an ordeal for him. Matilda Roberts half carried him, as it was. But Shadrach had kept his head?most of the men were so shocked by the loss of the horses and the terrible peril of the fire that they merely trudged along, heads down, unable to think ahead.
Caleb Cobb wheeled, and pulled out his big knife.
“You’re right,” he said. “We got horse meat, and it’s already cooked. That’s good, since we lost our cook.”
He looked at the weary troop and smiled.
“It’s every man for himself now, boys,” he said. “Carve off what you can carry, and let’s proceed.”
Call carved off a sizable chunk of haunch?not from his bay, but from another horse. Gus whittled a little on a gelding’s rump, but it was clear his heart was not in the enterprise.
“You better do what the Colonel said,” Call said. “You’ll be begging for mine, in a day or two.”
“I don’t expect I will,” Gus said. “I’ve still got my mind on a deer.”
“What makes you think you could hit a deer, if you saw one?” Call asked. “It’s open out here. A deer could see you before you got anywhere near gunshot range.”
“You worry too much,” Gus said. At the moment, meat was not what was on his mind. Caleb Cobb’s treachery in denying him the promotion was what was on his mind. He had gone over the edge of the canyon and taken the risk. Suppose his belt had slipped off, like the dog’s collar? He would be dead, and all for a dog’s sake. It was poor commanding, in Gus’s view. He had been the only man who volunteered?he ought to have been promoted on that score alone. He had been proud to be a corporal, for awhile, but now it seemed a petty title, considering the hardship that was involved.
While he was thinking of the hardship, an awful thought occurred to him. They were now on the open plain, walking through waist-high grass. The canyon was already several miles behind them.
But where the Comanches were, no one knew. The Indians could be drawing a circle around them, even as they walked. If they fired the grass again, there would be no canyon to hide them. They had no horses, and even horses had not been able to outrun the fire.
“What if they set another fire, Woodrow?” Gus asked. “We’d be fried like that jackrabbit you’re carrying.“Call walked on. What Gus had just said was obviously true. If the Indians fired the grass again they would all be killed. That was such a plain fact that he didn’t see any need to talk about it. Gus would do better to be thinking about grub, or waterholes, it seemed to him.
“Don’t it even worry you?” Gus asked.
“You think too much,” Call said. “You think about the wrong things, too. I thought you wanted to be a Ranger, until you met that girl. Now I guess you’d rather be in the dry goods business.”
Gus was irritated by his friend’s curious way of thinking.
“I wasn’t thinking about no girl,” he informed Call. “I was thinking about being burned up.”
“Rangering means you can die any day,” Call pointed out. “If you don’t want to risk it, you ought to quit.”
Just as he said it an antelope bounded up out of the tall grass, right in front of them. Gus had been carrying his rifle over one shoulder, barrel forward, stock back. By the time he got his gun to his shoulder, the antelope was an astonishing distance away. Gus shot, but the antelope kept running. Call raised his gun, only to find that Gus was right between him and the fleeing animal. By the time he stepped to the side and took aim the antelope was so far away that he didn’t shoot. Shadrach, who had seen the whole thing, was annoyed.
“You didn’t need to shoot it, you could have hit it over the head with your gun,” he said.
“Well, it moved quick,” Gus said, lamely. Who would expect an antelope to move slow? The whole troop was looking at him, as if it was entirely his fault that a tasty beast had escaped.
The incident brought Bigfoot to life, though?and Shadrach, too. The old man had entrusted his rifle to Matilda, but he got it back.
“That little buck was just half grown,” Bigfoot said. “I doubt it will run more than a mile. Maybe if we ease along we can kill it yet.” “Maybe,” Shadrach said. “Let’s go.”
The two scouts left together?Caleb Cobb had been walking so far ahead that he was unaware of the incident until he decided it was time to make a dry camp for the night. He had heard the shot and supposed someone had surprised some game. When he got back and discovered that both his scouts were gone in pursuit of an antelope, he was not pleased.
“Both of them went, after one little buck?” he asked. “Now, that was foolish, particularly when we got all this good horse meat to nibble on.”
Night fell and deepened, the sunset dying slowly along the wide western horizon. Matilda Roberts was pacing nervously. She blamed herself for not having tried harder to discourage Shadrach from going after the antelope. Bigfoot was younger?he could have tracked the antelope alone.
By midnight the whole camp had given up on the scouts. Matilda could not stop sobbing. Memory of Indians was on everybody’s mind. The two men could be enduring fierce tortures even then. Gus thought of the missed shot, time after time. If he only hadn’t had his rifle over his shoulder, he could have hit the antelope. But all his remembering didn’t help. The antelope was gone, and so were the scouts.
“Maybe they just camped and went to sleep,” Long Bill suggested. “It’s hard enough to find your way on this dern plain in the daylight. How could anyone do it at night?”
“Shadrach ain’t never been lost, night or day,” Matilda said. “He can find his way anywhere. He’d be here, if he wasn’t dead.”
Then she broke down again.
“He’s dead?he’s dead, I know it,” she said. “That goddamn hump man got him.”
“If he wasn’t dead, I’d shoot him, or Wallace one,” Caleb said. “I lost my dog and both my scouts in the same day. Why it would take two scouts to track one antelope buck is a conundrum.”
“Say that again?a what?” Long Bill asked. Brognoli sat beside him, his head still jerking, his look still glassy eyed. In the moments when his head stopped jerking, it was twisted at an odd angle on his neck.
“A conundrum,” Caleb repeated. “I visited Harvard College once and happened to learn the word.”
“What does it mean, sir?” Call asked.
‘ “I believe it’s Latin,” Gus said. One of his sisters had given him a Latin lesson, in the afternoon once, and he
