She gestured at Shadrach, who was coughing.Salazar had come to like Matilda?she was the only one of the Texans he did like. But he immediately rejected her plea.
“If we were a hospital we would put the sick men in beds,” he said. “But we are not a hospital. Every man must walk now.”
“Why today?” Matilda asked. “Just let the boy ride one more day ?with one more day’s rest, he might live.”
“To bury me?” Salazar asked. “Is that why you want him to live?” He was trying to make a small jest.
“I just want him to live,” Matilda said, ignoring the joke. “He’s suffered enough.”
“We have all suffered enough, but we are about to suffer more,” Salazar said. “It is not just you Texans who will suffer, either. For the next five days we will all suffer. Some of us may not live.”
“Why?” Gus asked. He walked up and stood listening to the conversation. “I don’t feel like dying, myself.”
Salazar gestured to the south. They were in a sparse desert as it was. They had seen no animals all the day before, and their water was low.
“There is the Jornada del Muerto,” he said. “The dead man’s walk.”
“What’s he talking about?” Johnny Carthage asked. Seeing that a parley was in progress, several of the Texans had wandered over, including Bigfoot Wallace.
“Oh, so this is where it is,” Bigfoot said. “The dead man’s walk. I’ve heard of it for years.”
“Now you will do more than hear of it, Senor Wallace,” Salazar said. “You will walk it. There is a village we must find, today or tomorrow. Perhaps they will give us some melons and some corn. After that, we will have no food and no water until we have walked the dead man’s walk.”
“How far across?” Long Bill asked. “I’m a slow walker, but if it’s that hard I’ll try not to lag.”
“Two hundred miles,” Salazar said. “Perhaps more. We will have to burn this wagon soon?maybe tonight. There is no wood in the place we are going.”
The voices had filtered through the red darkness in which Call lived. He opened his eyes, and saw all the Texans around him.
“What is it, boys?” he asked. “It’s frosty, ain’t it?”
“Woodrow, they want you to walk,” Gus said. “Do you think you can do it?”
“I’ll walk,” Call said. “I don’t like Mexican wagons anyway.”
“We’ll help you, Corporal,” Bigfoot said. “We can take turns toting you, if we have to.”
“It might warm my feet, to walk a ways,” Call said. “I can’t feel my toes.”
Cold feet was a common complaint among the Texans. At night the men wrapped their feet in anything they could find, but the fact was they couldn’t find much. Few of them slept more than an hour or two. It was better to sit talking over their adventures than to sleep cold. The exception was Bigfoot Wallace, who seemed unaffected by cold. He slept well, cold or hot.
“At least we’ve got the horses,” he remarked. “We can eat the horses, like we done before.”
“I expect the Mexicans will eat the horses,” Gus said. “They ain’t our horses.”
Call found hobbling on his frozen feet very difficult, yet he preferred it to lying in the wagon, where all he had to think about was the fire across his back. He could not keep up, though. Matilda and Gus offered to be his crutches, but even that was difficult. His wounds had scabbed and his muscles were tight?he groaned in deep pain when he tried to lift his arms across Gus’s shoulders.
“It’s no good, I’ll just hobble,” he said. “I expect I’ll get quicker once I warm up.”
Gus was nervous about bears?he kept looking behind the troop. He didn’t see any bears, but he did catch a glimpse of a cougar? just a glimpse, as the large brown cat slipped across a small gully.
Just then there was a shout from the column ahead. A cavalryman, one of the advance guard, was racing back toward the troop at top speed, his horse’s hooves kicking up little clouds of dust from the sandy ground.
“Now, what’s his big hurry?” Bigfoot asked. “You reckon he spotted a grizzly?”
“I hope not,” Gus said. “I’m in no mood for bears.”
Matilda and Shadrach were walking with the old Mexican, Francisco. They were well ahead of the other Texans. All the soldiers clustered around the rider, who held something in his hand.“What’s he got there, Matty?” Bigfoot asked, hurrying up. “The General’s hat,” Matilda said.
“That’s mighty odd,” Bigfoot said. “I’ve never knowed a general to lose his hat.”
Two MILES FARTHER ON they discovered that General Dimasio had lost more than his hat?he had lost his buggy, his driver, his cavalrymen, and his life. Four of the cavalrymen had been tied and piled in the buggy before the buggy was set on fire. The buggy had been reduced almost to ash?the corpses of the four cavalrymen were badly charred. The other cavalrymen had been mutilated but not scalped. General Dimasio had suffered the worst fate, a fate so terrible that everyone who looked at his corpse bent over and gagged. The General’s chest cavity had been opened and hot coals had been scooped into it. All around lay the garments and effects of the dead men. Both the fine buggy horses had been killed and butchered.
“Whoever done this got off with some tasty horse meat,” Bigfoot said.
Except for the burned cavalrymen, all the dead had several arrows in them.
“No scalps taken,” Bigfoot observed.“Apaches don’t scalp?ain’t interested,” Shadrach said. “They got better ways to kill you.”
“He is right,” Salazar said. “This is the work of Gomez. For awhile he was in Mexico, but now he is here. He has killed twenty travelers in the last month?now he has killed a great general.”
“He wasn’t great enough, I guess,” Bigfoot said. “I thought he rode off with a skimpy guard?I guess I was right.”
“Only Gomez would treat a general like this,” Salazar said. “Most Apaches would sell a general, if they caught one. But Gomez likes only to kill. He knows no law.”
Bigfoot considered that sloppy thinking.
“Well, he may know plenty of law,” he said. “But it ain’t his law and he don’t mind breaking it.”
Salazar received this comment irritably.
“You will wish he knew more law, if he catches you,” he said. “We are all in danger now.”
“I doubt he’d attack a party this big,” Bigfoot said. “Your general just had eleven men, counting himself.”
Salazar snapped his fingers; he had just noticed something.
“Speaking of counting,” he said. “Where is your Colonel? I don’t see his corpse.”
“By God, I don’t neither,” Bigfoot said. “Where is Caleb?”
“The coward, I expect he escaped,” Call said.
“More than that,” Gus said. “He probably made a deal with Gomez.”
“No,” Salazar said. “Gomez is Apache?he is not like us. He only kills.”
“He might have taken Caleb home with him, to play with,” Long Bill suggested. “I feel sorry for him if that’s so, even though he is a skunk.”
“I doubt Caleb Cobb would be taken alive,” Bigfoot said. “He ain’t the sort that likes to have coals shoveled into his belly.”
Before the burials were finished, one of the infantrymen found Caleb Cobb, naked, blind, and crippled, hobbling through the sandy desert, about a mile from where the Apaches had caught the Mexicans. Caleb’s legs and feet were filled with thorns?in his blindness he had wandered into prickly pear and other cactus.
“Oh, boys, you found me,” Caleb said hoarsely, as he was helped into camp. “They blinded me with thorns, the Apache devils.““They hamstrung him, too,” Bigfoot whispered. “I guess they figured he’d starve or freeze.”
“I expect that bear would have got him,” Gus said.
Even Call, beaten nearly to death himself, was moved to pity by the sight of Caleb Cobb, a man he thoroughly despised. To be blind, naked, and crippled in such a thorny wilderness, and in the cold, was a harder fate than even cowards deserved.
“How many were they, Colonel?” Salazar asked.
“Not many,” Caleb said, in his hoarse voice. “Maybe fifteen. But they were quick. They came at us at dawn, when we had the sun in our eyes. One of them clubbed me with a rifle stock before I even knew we were under attack.”
For a moment he lost his voice, and his ability to stand. He sagged in the arms of the two infantrymen who
