the whites, and they were not going to beat them. Only their own band and three or four others were still free Comanches. The bands that were free were the bands that could survive on the least, those who would eat small animals and dig roots from the earth. Already the bluecoat soldiers had come back to Texas and begun to fill up the old forts, places they had abandoned while they fought one another. Even if all the free tribes banded together there would not be enough warriors to defeat the bluecoat soldiers. With the buffalo gone so far north, the white soldiers had only to drive them farther and farther into the llano, until they starved or gave up.
'The whites are not foolish,' Buffalo Hump said. 'They know that it is easier to kill a buffalo than it is to kill one of us. They know that if they kill all the buffalo we will starve--then they won't have to fight us. Those who don't want to starve will have to go where the whites want to put them.' The two men sat in silence for a while. Some young men were racing their horses a little farther down the canyon. Kicking Wolf usually took a keen interest in such contests. He wanted to know which horses were fastest. But today he didn't care.
He felt too sad.
'The medicine men are deceiving the young warriors when they tell them the buffalo will return,' Buffalo Hump said. 'If any buffalo come back they will only be ghost buffalo. Their ghosts might return because they remember these lands. But that will not help us. We cannot eat their ghosts.' Thinking about the buffalo--how many there had once been; not a one remaining on the comancher@ia --Kicking Wolf grew so heavy with sadness that he could not speak. He had never thought that such abundance could pass, yet it had. He thought that it would have been better to have fallen in battle than to have lived to see such greatness pass and go. The sadness was so deep that no more ^ws came out of his throat. He got up and walked away without another ^w.
Buffalo Hump continued to sit, resting. He could scarcely see the horses racing on the prairie, though he could hear the drum of their hoofbeats. He was glad that Kicking Wolf had left. He did not like it anymore when people took up his time, talking foolishness about the buffalo returning. The medicine men thought that their ranting and praying could make the white buffalo hunters die, but it would surely be the other way around: the white buffalo hunters, with guns so powerful that they could shoot nearly to the horizon, would be making the medicine men die. Worm had already been killed by one of the long-shooting guns; of course old Worm had been crazy at the time.
He had smeared himself with a potion made from weasel glands and eagle droppings, convinced that it would stop a bullet--a buffalo hunter with a good aim had proven him wrong.
Later that day Buffalo Hump walked through the horse herd until he located his oldest horse, a thin gelding whose teeth were only stumps. That night he took his bow and arrows, his lance, and a few snares, and left the camp on the old horse. No one heard him go and no one would have carred if they had heard. Buffalo Hump thought the horse might be too old to climb the steep trail out of the canyon, but the horse was eager to go and climbed the trail as quickly as if he were a young colt again, snorting like a wild horse might snort.
When he reached the lip of the canyon Buffalo Hump didn't stop--he rode north and west, all night, only stopping when dawn touched the sky. He wanted to ride to the empty places, the land where he was not likely to meet any of the People, or any whites either. He had left the tribe forever--he wanted to see no more humans. Most of the talk of human beings was silly talk, talk that was of less weight than a man's breath. He had taken leave of all such silliness. He wanted to go where he could only hear the wind, and whatever animals might be moving near him--the little animals, ground squirrels and mice, that lived under the grass.
The thing that Buffalo Hump was most grateful for, as he rode into the emptiness, was the knowledge that in the years of his youth and manhood he had drawn the lifeblood of so many enemies. He had been a great killer; it was his way and the way of his people; no one in his tribe had killed so often and so well.
The killings were good to remember, as he rode his old horse deeper into the llano, away from all the places where people came.
'I feel like I've been around this ring once too often, Woodrow,' Augustus said.
'Don't you? The same governor we used to work for wants to send us after the same outlaw we ought to have killed way back when Inish Scull was our boss.' The governor he was referring to was e. m.
Pease, one of the few able men willing to take the provisional governorship under the terms of a harsh Reconstruction; the outlaw in question was Blue Duck, whose band of murderers was making travel hazardous from the Sabine to the Big Wichita. The army was busy trying to subdue the few remaining free Comanches; the rangers were depleted in numbers and in spirit, but they were still the only force capable of dealing with general lawlessness of a magnitude likely to be beyond the scope of local sheriffso.
'I agree we ought to have killed him then,' Call said. 'But we didn't. Now will have to do.' 'I dislike it!' Augustus said. His face was red and his neck swelled, as it was likely to do when he was in a temper. Why the temper, Call didn't understand. Governor Pease had been meek as a mouse when he called them in and asked them to go after Blue Duck.
'I can see you're riled but I don't know why,' Call said. 'Governor Pease was polite--he's always been polite.' 'I ain't a policeman, that's why I'm riled,' Augustus said. 'I don't mind hanging a fat bandit, or a skinny one either, if they're handy, but I've been a free ranger all this time and I don't like being told that all I'm good for is hanging bandits and putting drunks in jail. We ain't to fight Indians now, unless it's to save our hair. We can't chase a bandit across the Rio Grande. I feel handcuffed and I'm ready to quit.' 'You've been ready to quit ever since you joined up with Major Chevallie,' Call said.
He knew, though, that Gus's complaint was mainly valid. All they had been given to do lately was cool off feuding families, of which there were plenty among the land-grabbing settlers pushing into lands the Comanches were no longer able to contest. The country was changing--it wasn't the Governor's fault.
Call meant to point out that Blue Duck was no modest bandit. He was Buffalo Hump's son, and his gang of ruffians had taken more than forty lives along the military trail that led from Fort Smith to Santa Fe. That trail, blazed by the great Captain Marcy himself, passed through the Cross Timbers and the southern plains.
Before he could present his arguments, though, Augustus marched into a saloon--when in town, he was seldom outside the saloons. Whenever he was annoyed or bored, Augustus drank--and he was all too frequently annoyed or bored. In that, he was no exception, of course; the frontier was laced with whiskey.
What Call could not contest was Gus's fury at the diminished status of the rangers. For years the rangers had provided what protection the frontier families had; it was hard, now, to find themselves treated as no better than local constables.
Call, as much as Gus, wanted to be done with it, but he could not feel right about refusing a request from Governor Pease, a kind man who had fought with the legislature many times in his earlier term to get the rangers what they needed in the way of supplies, horses, and weaponry.
He thought that catching or killing Blue Duck was something they ought to do--once they had done it, that would be enough. They could quit their rangering then, though what they would do once they quit he didn't know.
