nicely--they were already just out of rifle range.
Call watched Captain Scull, waiting for him to give the order to mount and pursue--the Captain had taken out his binoculars and was studying the racing horsemen.
'I was looking for brands on the horses,' he said. 'I was hoping our Abilene ponies might be there. But no luck--they're just Comanche ponies.' All the rangers stood by their horses, waiting for the order to pursue the Comanches, but Captain Scull merely stood watching the five young warriors race away, as casual as if he had been watching a Sunday horse race.
'Captain, ain't we gonna chase 'em?
They kilt Jimmy Watson,' Augustus asked, puzzled by the Captain's casual attitude.
'No, we'll not chase them--not on tired horses,' the Captain said. 'Those are just the pups. The old he-wolf is down there somewhere, waiting. I doubt those youngsters expected to hit anybody, when they shot--they were just trying to lure us down into some box canyon, where the he-wolf can cut us off and tear out our throats.' He turned and put his binoculars back in their leather case.
'I'd prefer to wait for that stew to mature and then take breakfast,' he said. 'If the old he-wolf wants us bad enough, let him come.
We'll oblige him with a damn good scrap, and when it's over I'll take his hide back to Austin and nail it to the Governor's door.' 'Sir, what'll we do with Jimmy?' Long Bill asked. 'This ground's froze hard.
It'll take a good strong pick to hack out a grave in ground like this, and we ain't got a pick.' Captain Scull came over and looked at the dead man--he knelt, rolled the man over, and inspected the fatal wound.
'There's no remedy for bad luck, is there?' he said, addressing the question to no one in particular.
'If Watson hadn't raised his arm just when he did, the worst he would have gotten out of this episode would have been a broken arm. But he lifted his gun and the bullet had a clear path to his vitals. I'll miss the man. He was someone to talk wives with.' 'What, sir?' Augustus asked. The remark startled him.
'Wives, Mr. McCrae,' Inish Scull said. 'You're a bachelor. I doubt you can appreciate the fascination of the subject--but James Watson appreciated it. He was on his third wife when he had the misfortune to catch his dying. He and I could talk wives for hours.' 'Well, but what happened to his wives?' Long Bill inquired. 'I'm a married man.
I'd like to know.' 'One died, one survives him, and the one in the middle ran off with an acrobat,' the Captain said. 'That's about average for wives, I expect. You'll find that out soon enough, Mr.
McCrae, if you take it into your head to marry.' Augustus was thoroughly sorry that the subject of marriage had come up. It seemed to him that he had been trying to get married for half his life-- he had just happened, unluckily, to fall in love with the one woman who wouldn't have him.
'Sir, even if one of his wives did run off with an acrobat, we've still got to bury him, someway,' Long Bill said. Once Long Bill got his mind on something he rarely allowed it to be deflected until the question at hand was closed. Now the question at hand was how to bury a man when the ground was too frozen to yield them a grave. When Jimmy Watson had been alive he needed wives, apparently, and it was a need Long Bill understood and sympathized with. But now he was dead: what he needed was a grave.
'Well, I suppose we do need to bury James Watson--t's the Christian way,' the Captain said. 'It was not the way taken by my cousin Willy, though. Cousin Willy was a biologist. He studied with Professor Agassiz, at Harvard. Willy was particularly fond of beetles--excessively fond, some might say. He fancied tropical beetles, in particular. Professor Agassiz took him to Brazil, where there are some wonderful beetles--m beetles than any place in the world except Madagascar, Willy claimed. They've even got an undertaker beetle, down there in Brazil.' 'What kind?' Augustus asked. He had vaguely heard of Brazil, but he had never heard of an undertaker beetle.
'An undertaker beetle, sir,' Captain Scull went on. 'Willy wanted to go back into the food chain the fastest way possible, and the fastest way was to have himself laid out naked in a tidy spot where these undertaker beetles were plentiful.
'So that's what they did with W,' the Captain continued. 'They had no choice--Willy had fixed it all in his will. They laid him out naked in a pretty spot and the beetles immediately got to work. Pretty soon Willy was buried, and by the next day he was part of the food chain again, just as he wished. If we left James Watson to the coyotes and the buzzards, we'd be accomplishing the same thing.' Long Bill Coleman was horrified by such talk. He was unfamiliar with Brazil, and the thought of being buried by beetles gave him the shudders. Not only was the Captain forgetting about Jimmy Watson's widow, whose feelings about the burial had to be considered, he was even forgetting about heaven.
'Now then, that's strange talk,' he said.
'How would a man get up to heaven, with no one to say any scriptures over him, andwith just a dern bunch of beetles for undertakers? Of course, out here in the baldies we can't expect undertakers, but I guess I'll try to bury my pards myself --I wouldn't trust the job to a bunch of dern bugs.' 'My cousin Willy was of an agnostical bent, Mr. Coleman,' the Captain said. 'I don't think he believed in heaven, but he did believe in bugs. They're not to be underrated, sir--not according to my cousin Willy. There are more than a million species of insects, Mr.
Coleman, and they're a sight more adaptable than us. I expect there will be bugs aplenty when we humans are all gone.' Young Pea Eye Parker was so hungry, he found it hard to pay attention to the conversation. For one thing, he couldn't figure out what a food chain could be, unless the Captain was talking about link sausage. How a beetle in a country he had never heard of could turn a dead man into link sausage was beyond his ken. Deets's stew pot was bubbling furiously; now and then, a good odor drifted his way. His only opinion was that he himself did not intend to be buried naked. It would be a hard shock to his ma if he came walking into heaven without a stitch.
Deets, stirring the stew, did not like to be discussing dead folks so boldly--for all they knew, the dead could still hear. Just because the lungs stopped working didn't mean the hearing stopped, too. The dead person could still be in there, listening, and if a dead person was to hear bad things said about him, he might witch you. Deets had no desire to be witched--when it became necessary to make some comment about a dead person, he made sure his comment was respectful.
Call was vexed. He was prepared to go fight the Comanches who had just killed Jimmy Watson-- if the rangers had pressed the pursuit at once, they might have got close enough to bring down a Comanche or two. He didn't think Buffalo Hump was waiting to ambush them; to him it just looked like a party of five young braves, hoping to count coup on the white men--and they had counted coup.
How could the Captain stand around talking about beetles when one of their men had been killed?
