grease up to your elbow. Kirker ain’t even sly. He could have greased this hair if he wanted to fool us, but he didn’t. I expect he was too lazy.”
“Get away from them scalps?they’re government property now,” Kirker said. “I took ‘em and I intend to collect my bounty.”
Shadrach looked at the Major?he didn’t believe the Major was firm, although it was undeniable that he was an accurate shot.
“If a Mexican posse shows up, let ‘em have these two,” he advised. “This ain’t Indian hair, and what’s more, it ain’t grown-up hair. These two went over to Mexico and killed a passel of children.”
Kirker merely sneered.
“Hair’s hair,” he said. “This is government property now, and you’re welcome to keep your goddamn hands off it.”
Call and Gus waited, expecting the Major to shoot Kirker, and possibly Glanton too, but the Major didn’t shoot. Bigfoot and Shadrach walked away, disgusted. Shadrach mounted, crossed the river, and was gone for several hours. Kirker kept on chewing his antelope jerky, and Glanton went sound asleep, leaning against his horse.
Major Chevallie did look at Kirker hard. He knew he ought to shoot the two men and leave them to the flies. Shadrach’s opinion was no doubt accurate: the men had been killing Mexican children; Mexican children were a lot easier to hunt than Comanches.
But the Major didn’t shoot. His troop was in an uncertain position, vulnerable to attack at any minute, and Kirker and Glanton made two more fighting men, adding two guns to the company’s meager strength. If there was a serious scrape, one or both of them might be killed anyway. If not, they could always be executed at a later date.
“Stay this side of the river from now on,” the Major said?he still had his pistol in his hand. “If either of you cross it again, I’ll hunt you down like dogs.”
Kirker didn’t flinch.
“We ain’t dogs, though?we’re wolves?at least I am. You won’t be catching me, if I go. As for Glanton, you can have him. I’m tired of listening to his goddamn snores.”
Gus soon forgot the incident, but Call didn’t. He listened to Kirker sharpen his knife and wished he had the authority to kill the man himself. In his view Kirker was a snake, and worse than a snake. If you discovered a snake in your bedclothes, the sensible thing would be to kill it.
Major Chevallie had looked right at the snake, but hadn’t killed it.The sandstorm blew for another hour, until the camp and everything in it was covered with sand. When it finally blew out, men discovered that they couldn’t find utensils they had carelessly laid down before the storm began. The sky overhead was a cold blue. The plain in all directions was level with sand; only the tops of sage bushes and chaparral broke the surface. The Rio Grande was murky and brown. The little mare, still snubbed to the tree, was in sand up to her knees. All the men stripped naked in order to shake as much sand as possible out of their clothes; but more sand filtered in, out of their hair and off their collars. Gus brushed the branch of a mesquite tree and a shower of sand rained down on him.
Only the old Indian woman and the boy with no tongue made no attempt to rid themselves of sand. The fire had finally been smothered, but the old woman and the boy still sat by it, sand banked against their backs. To Call they hardly seemed human. They were like part of the ground.
Gus, in high spirits, decided to be a bronc rider after all. He took it into his head to ride the Mexican mare.
“I expect that storm’s got her cowed,” he said, to Call.
“Gus, she ain’t cowed,” Call replied. He had the mare by the ears again, and detected no change in her attitude.
Sure enough, the mare threw Gus on the second jump. Several of the naked Rangers laughed, and went on shaking out their clothes.
IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, still carrying more sand in his clothes than he would have liked, Major Chevallie attempted to question the old woman and the boy. He gave them coffee and fed them a little hardtack first, hoping it would make them talkative?but the feast, such as it was, failed in its purpose, mainly because no one in the troop spoke any Comanche,
The Major had supposed Bigfoot Wallace to be adept in the tongue, but Bigfoot firmly denied any knowledge of it.
“Why no, Major,” Bigfoot said. “I’ve made it a practice to stay as far from the Comanche as I can get,” Bigfoot said. “What few I ever met face-on I shot. Some others have shot at me, but we never stopped to palaver.”
The old woman wore a single bear tooth on a rawhide cord around her neck. The tooth was the size of a small pocketknife. Several of the men looked at it with envy; most of them would have been happy to own a bear tooth that large.
“She must have been a chiefs woman,” Long Bill speculated.
“Otherwise why would a squaw get to keep a fine grizzly tooth like that?”
Matilda Roberts knew five or six words of Comanche and tried them all on the old woman, without result. The old woman sat where she had settled when she walked into the camp, backed by a hummock of sand. Her rheumy eyes were focused on the campfire, or on what had been the campfire.
The tongueless boy, still hungry, dug most of the sandy turtle meat out of the ashes of the campfire and ate it. No one contested him, although Matilda dusted the sand off a piece or two and gnawed at the meat herself. The boy perked up considerably, once he had eaten the better part of Matilda’s snapping turtle. He did his best to talk, but all that came out were moans and gurgles. Several of the men tried to talk to him in sign, but got nowhere.
“Goddamn Shadrach, where did he go?” the Major asked. “We’ve got a Comanche captive here, and the only man we have who speaks Comanche leaves.”
As the day wore on, Gus and Call took turns getting pitched off the mare. Call once managed to stay on her five hops, which was the best either of them achieved. The Rangers soon lost interest in watching the boys get pitched around. A few got up a card game. Several others took a little target practice, using cactus apples as targets. Bigfoot Wallace pared his toenails, several of which had turned coal black as the result of his having worn footgear too small for his feet?it was that or go barefooted, and in the thorny country they were in, bare feet would have been a handicap.
Toward sundown Call and Gus were assigned first watch. They took their position behind a good clump of chaparral, a quarter of a mile north of the camp. Major Chevallie had been making another attempt to converse with the old Comanche woman, as they were leaving camp. He tried sign, but the old woman looked at him, absent, indifferent.
“Shadrach just rode off and he ain’t rode back,” Call said. “I feel better when Shadrach’s around.”
“I’d feel better if there were more whores,” Gus commented. In the afternoon he had made another approach to Matilda Roberts, only to be rebuffed.
“I should have stayed on the riverboats,” he added. “I never lacked for whores, on the riverboats.”
Call was watching the north. He wondered if it was really true that Shadrach and Bigfoot could smell Indians. Of course if you got close to an Indian, or to anybody, you could smell them. There were times on sweaty days when he could easily smell Gus, or any other Ranger who happened to be close by. Black Sam, the cook, had a fairly strong smell, and so did Ezekiel?the latter had not bothered to wash the whole time Call had known him.
But dirt and sweat weren’t what Bigfoot and Shadrach had been talking about, when they said they smelled Indians. The old woman and the boy had been nearly a mile away, when they claimed to smell them. Surely not even the best scout could smell a person that far away.
“There could have been more Indians out there, when Shad said he smelled them,” Call speculated. “There could be a passel out there, just waiting.”
Gus McCrae took guard duty a good deal more lightly than his companion, Woodrow Call. He looked at his time on guard as a welcome escape from the chores that cropped up around camp? gathering firewood, for example, or chopping it, or saddle-soaping the Major’s saddle. Since he and Woodrow were the youngest Rangers in the troop, they were naturally expected to do most of the chores. Several times they had even been required to shoe horses, although Black Sam, the cook, was also a more than adequate blacksmith.
