bear, and the bear had become more trouble than it was worth.
Ermoke still faced him, still hot.
'If you want to kill somebody, go kill that other old man,' Blue Duck said. 'I'm tired of looking at him--g club him out. But don't bother my friend Idahi. If you bother him I'll club you out.' Ermoke didn't like what he was told-- he didn't like it that a Comanche was allowed to come and go, just because he was a Comanche. There was little food in the camp. Tomorrow he meant to take a few of the better warriors and try to find game. He thought he might follow the Comanche while he was at it.
He didn't know. He was angry, but not angry enough to start a fight with Blue Duck, not then.
To relieve his anger he got a club and beat the old white man until he had broken most of his ribs. Several of the renegades watched the beating, idly. One of them, a short whiskey trader with a bent leg named Monkey John, began to upbraid the women for doing such a crude job of skinning the bear. They had got the skin off but it was cut in several places. The bear lay on its back, a naked pile of meat. When Monkey John got tired of yelling at the cowering women he took his knife and cut off the bear's paws, meaning to extract all the claws. Some of the half- breeds put great store in bear claws--Monkey John meant to use them as money and gamble with them.
In the night the old man who had been so severely beaten coughed up blood and died. One of the half-breeds dragged him into the river, but the river was shallow. The old man didn't float far. He grounded on a mud bank, a few hundred yards from camp. In the morning the mud bank was thick with carrion birds.
'Buzzard breakfast, serves him right,' Monkey John said. He rattled his bear claws, hoping to entice some of the renegades into a game of cards.
Jake Spoon's decision to leave the rangers and go north caught everyone by surprise except Augustus McCrae, who, as he grew older, laid more and more frequent claims to omniscience.
Gus had stopped allowing himself to be surprised; when something unexpected happened, such as Jake abruptly quitting the troop, Augustus immediately claimed that he had known it was going to happen.
Augustus's habit of appearing all-knowing weighed on everybody, but it weighed heaviest on Woodrow Call.
'How did you know it?' Call asked. 'Jake said himself he only made up his mind last night.' 'Well, but that's a lie,' Augustus said.
'Jake's been planning to leave for years, ever since you took against him. It's just that he's a lazy cuss and was slow to get around to it.' 'I didn't take against the man,' Call said, 'although I agree that he's lazy.' 'Would you at least agree that you don't like the man?' Gus asked. 'You ain't liked him a bit since he started bunking with Maggie--and that was back about the time the war started.' Call ignored the comment. It had been some years since he had been up the steps to Maggie's room. If he met her on the street he said a polite hello, but had no other contact with her. The boy, Newt, was always around where the rangers were, of course; Pea Eye, Deets, and Jake had made a kind of pet of the boy. But what went on between Jake Spoon and Maggie Tilton had long ceased to be any concern of his.
'I don't regard him highly, will that satisfy you?' Call said.
'No, but I have passed the point in life where I expect to be satisfied,' Augustus said.
'At least I don't expect to be satisfied with much. When it comes right down to it, Woodrow, I guess my own cooking beats anything I've come across in this life.' Lately, due to a dissatisfaction with a succession of company cooks--Deets no longer had the time to cook, due to his duties with the horses--Augustus had mastered the art of making sourdough biscuits, a skill of which he was inordinately proud.
'I will allow that Jake has done a fair job with the bookkeeping,' Call said. 'That will be your job, once he leaves, and you need to be strict about it.' They were sitting in front of a little two-room shack they had purchased together, at the start of the war, to be their living quarters. Augustus, after the death of his Nell, vowed never to marry again; Call gave marriage no thought. The house cost them forty-five dollars. It consisted of two rooms with a dirt floor. It beat sleeping outdoors, but not by much, particularly not in the season when the fleas were active.
'Bookkeep yourself,' Gus said. 'I will leave too before I'll waste my time scribbling in a ledger.' Across the way, at the lots, they could see Jake Spoon, standing around with Deets and Pea Eye and several other rangers. His horse was saddled but he seemed in no hurry to leave. He sat on the top rail of the corral, with Newt, dangling his feet.
'He said he was leaving this morning, but it's nearly dark and he's still here,' Call said.
'Maybe he just wants to spend one more night in safe company,' Augustus suggested. 'With the war ending I expect he'll have to put up with a lot of thieving riffraff on the roads.' 'I expect so,' Call said, wishing Jake would go on and leave. Some of the rangers were using his departure as an occasion for getting thoroughly drunk.
'The question ain't why Jake's leaving, it's why we're staying,' Augustus said. 'We ought to up and quit, ourselves.' Call had been thinking along the same lines, but had not pushed his thoughts hard enough to reach a conclusion. The distant war had ended but the Comanche war hadn't; there was still plenty of rangering to do-- yet the thought of quitting had occurred to him more than once.
'If we don't quit pretty soon we'll be doing this when we're ninety years old,' Augustus said. 'Some young governor will be sending us out to catch rascals that any decent sheriff ought to be able to catch.' 'And that will have been life,' he added. 'A lot of whoring and the rest of the time spent catching rascals.' 'I would like to see the Indian business through,' Call replied.
'Woodrow, it's through,' Augustus said.
'The settlers up in Jack County don't think so,' Call said. There had been a small massacre only the week before--a party of teamsters had been ambushed and killed.
'I have no doubt a few more firecrackers will go off,' Augustus said. 'But not many. The Yankee military boys will soon come down and finish off the Comanche.' Call knew there was truth in what Gus said.
Most of the Comanche bands had already come in--only a few hundred warriors were still free and inclined to fight. Still, it was too soon to say it was over; besides that, there was the border, as chaotic from the standpoint of law and order as it had been before the Mexican War.
Augustus, though, was not through with his discourse on the Indian question.
'In six months' time we'll have the Yankees here, giving us orders,' he said.
