'That's Charlie Goodnight--I expect he's got news,' Augustus said.
Major Featherstonhaugh and Lieutenant Dikuss both looked in the direction Augustus was pointing but they could see nothing, just high clouds and wavery horizon. The Major could think of very little besides how much he desired to wash. He was sixty-one years old and never, in his more than three decades of soldiering, had he felt as thoroughly soiled as he felt at the moment.
During the weathery night the blowing sand had worked its way into his skin to a depth no dust had ever been allowed to penetrate before. Besides that, his canteen was empty; he could not even wet his kerchief and wipe the dust off his face; his lips were so cracked from the dryness that he would have been hard put to eat even if they had more palatable food; all day the men talked of game, but they saw no game. The Major had once been offered a favorable position in a dry goods firm in Baltimore, but had turned it down out of a distaste for the frivolity of town life. As he stared at the Texas plain, dirt under his collar, incapable of seeing the rider that Captain McCrae could not only see but identify, the Major could not help wondering if he had been wise to turn down that position in the dry goods firm. After all, he could have resided outside of Baltimore and ridden in a buggy--if nothing else there would have been plenty of fine, meltable snow.
'How can you tell who it is?' Lieutenant Dikuss asked. He had finally been able to detect motion in the sage flats to the north, but he could not even tell that the motion was made by a human on a horse. Yet Augustus McCrae could see the horse and even identify the rider.
'Why, I know Charlie,' Augustus said.
'I know how he rides. He comes along kind of determined. He don't look fast, but the next thing you know he's there.' Events soon bore out Augustus's point-- the next thing the troop knew, Goodnight was there.
'I expected you to be farther along, Captain,' Goodnight said. 'I suppose the military had a hard time keeping up.' Goodnight nodded at Major Featherstonhaugh and promptly turned his horse, as if assuming that the company would immediately respond and follow him. His impatience with military behaviour was well known.
'Nope, this is a speedy troop, Charlie,' Augustus said. 'The fact is the Major dropped his compass in that sandstorm yesterday and had to go back for it. It's a prominent compass, made in Reading, England.' Major Featherstonhaugh, though startled by the man's manner, did not intend to let himself be deflected from his original purpose by mere frontier rudeness; he was dusty as an old boot and felt that his efficiency as a commander would soon diminish if he could not secure a good wash.
'Any springs ahead of us, sir?' he asked Goodnight. 'The sand has been plentiful the last two days--I think we could all profit from a good bath.
'I imagine our weapons need cleaning as well,' he added--it had just occurred to him that the blowing dust might have gummed up mechanisms to their pistols and rifles and revolvers.
Military ignorance did not surprise Goodnight.
'There's a fine spring about three hundred miles due north of here, Major,' he said.
'I expect you could reach it in a week if you don't lose your compass again.' 'Sir, three hundred miles?' Major Featherstonhaugh asked, aghast.
'That is, if you can get through the Comanches,' Goodnight added.
'How many Comanches, and how far ahead?' Augustus asked.
The soldiers, some of whom had been grimly amused by Goodnight's brusque treatment of Major Featherstonhaugh--he was not a popular leader--ceased to be amused; mention of Comanches was enough to quell all merriment in the troop and replace it with dread. The thought of Comanches called into their minds scenes of torture and dismemberment. They had all heard too many stories.
'Charlie, have you run into our red foes?' Augustus inquired again.
'Crossed their trail,' Goodnight said.
'It's a hunting party. They're about thirty miles ahead of us, but they're lazing along. I think we can overtake them if we hurry.
They've got nearly fifty stolen horses and I expect a captive or two.' 'Then let's go,' Augustus said. Before putting spurs in his horse and following Goodnight, who had already left--he had reached down and accepted a tin cup full of coffee from Deets and drained it in three swallows-- Augustus looked back at the few dirty, discouraged, ignorant, and ill-paid men that constituted the troop, all of whom, including Major Featherstonhaugh, looked as if they wished they could be somewhere else in the world.
'We're going after the Comanches--don't lame your horses,' Gus said. 'It's lucky you dropped your compass, Major. The horses got a night's rest and that might make the difference.' Then he turned and rode. It was cruel to press men as hard as it would be necessary to press them now, but the alternative was to lead a futile expedition that would accomplish nothing. With war raging among the whites, the Comanches had grown bold again--in some places the line of white settlement had been driven back almost one hundred miles. Only those settlers brave enough to live in homemade forts and risk death every day as they worked in their fields farmed the western country now. He and Call had had to abandon the border to banditry; answering raids on the northwestern frontier took all their time and resources.
Lately they had scarcely been in town long enough to launder their clothes.
The rangers were too few in number to overwhelm the war parties, but their guns had improved and their marksmanship as well. They would sometimes demoralize their attackers by killing a few prominent warriors--z fighting men they had become a match for the Comanches, but their horses, for the most part heavy and slow, were rarely capable of keeping up with the leaner, faster Comanche ponies.
Goodnight, in his brief time in the soldiers' camp, had quickly sized up the state of the horses. When Augustus caught up with him he did not hold back his assessment.
'Those horses are just glue buckets with legs,' he told Augustus. 'I doubt they've got fifty miles in them.' 'I doubt they've got forty,' Gus agreed.
Goodnight, of course, was well mounted, on a gelding with sure feet and abundant wind; Augustus, likewise, had taken care to provide himself with a resilient mount. But most of the troopers were not so fortunate.
'We're fighting horse Indians, not walking Indians,' he himself had pointed out, to more than one governor and many legislators, but the rangers were still mounted on the cheapest horseflesh the horse traders could
