was anxious to impress Caleb Cobb with his mental powers?perhaps he’d make sergeant yet.
“Oh, are you a scholar, Mr. McCrae?” Caleb asked.
“No, but I still believe it’s Latin?I’ve had lessons,” Gus said. The lessons part was a lie. After one lesson of thirty minutes duration he had given up the Latin language forever.
“Well, I heard it in Boston, and Boston ain’t very Latin,” Caleb said. “Conundrum is a thing you can’t figure out. What I can’t figure out is why two scouts would go after one antelope.”
“Two’s better than one, out here,” Long Bill said. “I wouldn’t want to go walking off without somebody with me who knew the way back.”
“If Shad ain’t dead, he’s left,” Matilda said. “He was talking about leaving anyway.”
“Left to do what?” Caleb asked. “We’re on the Staked Plains. All there is to do is wander.”
“Left, just left,” Matilda said. “I guess he didn’t want to take me with him.”
Then Matilda broke down. She sobbed deeply for awhile, and then her sobs turned to howls. Her whole body shook and she howled and howled, as if she were trying to howl up her guts. In the emptiness of the prairies the howls seemed to hover in the air. They made the men uneasy?it was as if a great she-wolf were howling, only the she-wolf was in their midst. No one could understand it. Shadrach had gone off to kill an antelope buck, and Matilda was howling?a woman abandoned.
Many of the men shifted a little, wishing the woman would just be quiet. She was a whore. No one had asked her to form an attachment to old Shadrach anyway. He was a mountain man?mountain men were born to wander.
Several men had been hoping Matilda would become a whore again?they had a long walk ahead, and a little coupling would at least be a diversion. But hearing her howl, the same men, Long Bill among them, began to have second thoughts. The woman was howling like a beast, and a frightening beast at that. Coupling with her would be risky. Besides, old Shadrach might not be gone. He might return at an inconvenient time and take offense.
Caleb Cobb was unaffected by Matilda’s howling. He was eating a piece of horse meat?he glanced at Matilda from time to time. It amused him that the troop had become so uneasy, just because a woman was crying. Love, with all its mystery, had arrived in their midst, and they didn’t like it. A whore had fallen in love with an old man of the mountains. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it had.
The men were unnerved by it?such a thing was unnecessary, even unnatural. Even the Comanches, in a way, worried them less. Comanches did what they were expected to, which was kill whites. It might mean war to the death, but at least there was no uncertainty about what to expect. But here was a woman howling like a she- wolf?what sense did that make?
“Love’s a terrible price to pay for company, ain’t it, Matty?” Caleb said. “I won’t pay it, myself. I’d rather do without the company.”
One by one, the exhausted men fell asleep. Gus wanted to play cards; there was rarely a night when the urge for cardplaying didn’t come over him. But the men ignored him. They didn’t want to play cards when they had nothing to play for, and were thirsty anyway. It was pointless to play cards when Buffalo Hump and his warriors might be about to hurl down on them, and Johnny Carthage said as much.
“Well, they ain’t here now, why can’t we play a few hands?” Gus asked, annoyed that his friends were such sleepyheads.
The men didn’t even answer. They just ignored him. For awhile, once Matty’s howls subsided, the only sound in camp was the sound of shuffling cards?Gus shuffled and shuffled the deck, to keep his hands busy.
Call took the guard?he went away from camp a little ways to stand it. He preferred to be apart at night, to think over the day’s action?if there was action. It might be that he would command a troop someday. He wanted to learn; and yet he had no teachers. He was on his second expedition as a Ranger and nothing on either expedition had been well planned. In all their encounters with the Indians, the Indians had outplanned them and outfought them, by such a margin that it was partly luck that any of them survived.
Call couldn’t understand it. Caleb Cobb had spoken of Harvard College, and Major Chevallie had been at West Point?Call knew little about Harvard College, but he did know that West Point was where generals and colonels were trained. If these men had such good schooling, why didn’t they plan better? It was worrisome. Now they were out in the middle of a big plain, and no one seemed to know much about where they were going or how to survive until they got there. No one knew how to find water reliably, or what plants they could eat, if they had to eat plants. It was fine to rely on game, if there was game, but what if there wasn’t? Even old Jesus,the Mexican blacksmith in San Antonio, knew more about plants than any one of the Rangers?though maybe not more than Sam had known.
It was obviously wrong to allow only one or two men in a troop to be keepers of all the knowledge that the troop needed for survival. Sam had known how to doctor, but he had fallen over a cliff and no one had bothered to get instructions from him about how to treat various wounds. Call had been made a little uneasy by Matilda’s howling, but he was not as affected by it as most of the other men. Probably she would stop crying when she wore out; probably she would get up and be herself again, the next day. Call liked Matilda: she had been helpful to him on more than one occasion. The fact that she had fastened on Shadrach to love was a matter beyond his scope. People could love whom they pleased, he supposed. That was excusable?what wasn’t excusable, in his view, was setting off on a long, dangerous expedition without adequate preparation. He resolved that if he ever got to lead Rangers, he would see that each man under his command received clear training and sound instruction, so they would have a chance to survive, if the commander was lost.
Call enjoyed his guard time. Now that there were no horses to steal, the Indians would not need to come around, unless it was to murder them. He could see no reason for them to risk a direct attack. The Rangers had no water and little food. It was hundreds of miles to where they were going, and no one knew the way. The Comanches didn’t need to put themselves at risk, just to destroy the Rangers; the country would do the job for them.
He liked sitting apart from the camp, listening to the night sounds from the prairie. Coyotes howled, and other coyotes answered them. Occasionally, he would hear the scratchings of small animals. Hunting birds, hawks or owls, passed overhead. Sometimes Call wished that he could be an Indian for a few days, or at least find a friendly Indian who could train him in their skills. The Comanches, on two nights, had stolen thirty horses from a well-guarded place. He would have liked to go along with the horse thieves on such a raid, to see how they did it. He wanted to know how they could creep into a horse herd without disturbing it. He wanted to know how they could take the horses out without being seen, or heard.
He knew, though, that no Indian was likely to come along and offer to instruct him; he would just have to watch and learn. It annoyed him that Gus McCrae had so little interest in the skills needed for rangering. All Gus thought of was whores, cards, and the girl in the general store in Austin. If Gus had been carrying his rifle correctly, he could have killed the buck antelope and the troop would not have lost its scouts.
Just before dawn, with the night peaceful, Call relaxed and dozed for a minute. Though it seemed only minutes that he dozed, his awakening was rude. Someone yanked his head back by the hair, and drew a finger across his throat.
“They say you don’t feel the knife that cuts your throat,” Bigfoot said. “If I had been a Comanche, you’d be dead.”
Call was badly embarrassed. He had been caught asleep. It was only just beginning to be light. He saw Shadrach, a little distance behind Bigfoot. The old man was leading three horses.
“Yep, we found three nags,” Bigfoot said. “I guess they were lucky and found a thin patch of fire.”
“We thought you were dead,” Call told them. “Matty was upset about Shad.”
“Shad’s fine?he wants to go look for more horses,” Bigfoot said. “Three nags won’t carry this troop to New Mexico.”
Caleb Cobb gave the returning scouts a stony welcome. A rattlesnake had crawled across him during the night and disturbed his sleep. His temper was foul, and he didn’t bother to conceal the fact.
“Nobody told you to go chasing antelope,” he said. “But since you went, where’s the meat? If I still had chains I’d put them on you.”
The carcass of the little antelope was slung across one of the recaptured horses. Shadrach pulled it off, and pitched it at Caleb’s feet. He was angry, but Bigfoot Wallace was angrier. Few of the men had seen Bigfoot’s temper rise, but those who had knew to lean far back from it. His face had grown red and his eyes menacing, as he stood before Caleb Cobb.
