What he found did not please him. Only five or six of the horses looked strong enough to go where Blue Duck was going.
'If you know where he's going, I wish you'd tell us,' Call said, although he knew it was probably unwise to put a direct question to the tracker. Famous Shoes had never ceased to madden and frustrate him. Sometimes he would speak as plainly as a white man, but, at other times, no amount of questioning would produce any but the most elliptical replies.
'I don't know where he is going unless it is to Black Mesa,' Famous Shoes said. 'I don't know why he would want to go there. It is where the Comanches used to go to pray, but I don't know if that is why he is going.' 'Doubtful. He don't strike me as being a man of prayer,' Augustus said. 'I never heard of Black Mesa. How far away is it?' 'It is a mesa where the rocks are black,' Famous Shoes said. 'I have never been there--there is no water in that country. His men have only one horse apiece. They will die if they try to follow him.' He looked around at the rangers, hoping that Captain Call or Captain McCrae would understand what he meant, which was that they should send most of the men home. He thought either of the captains would be a match for Blue Duck: he saw no reason why they should take eight rangers into the driest part of the llano and try to keep them alive.
Call and Augustus immediately took his point, which was that they too had more men than they could hope to keep alive.
'There's only three outlaws,' Call said to Augustus. 'I'd say that Pea and Deets are all we need. We better send the rest of these men home while they can find their way.' 'If they can find their way,' Augustus said.
'We're way out here in the big empty. They might just ride around in circles until they fall over and drop.' Call knew there was a chance that Gus was right.
Few men were truly competent at navigating the deceptive, featureless plains. Even experienced plainsmen sometimes lost confidence in their judgments, or even in their compasses. Some familiar-looking ridge or rise in the ground would tease their memories and tempt them to rethink their course, often with serious or even fatal consequences.
Augustus looked around. It was a beautiful spring day; the sweep of the long horizons was appealing, and yet, except for the arch of the sun, there was nothing in sight that would suggest direction. Some of the men had already become nervous, at the thought of being left with no guide.
'These men hired on to ranger, Woodrow, let 'em ranger on back home,' Gus said. A few minutes later, six nervous, apprehensive men, under the nominal leadership of Stove Jones, were trotting away to the southeast, toward the distant rivers and the even more distant settlements. Call, Augustus, Pea Eye, and Deets kept one pack mule. More important, they kept Famous Shoes.
While the men who were being sent home were saddling up and dividing the few supplies, Famous Shoes walked a few hundred yards to the north, to smell the wind. It disturbed him that he could not sense where Blue Duck was going, or what he might do. Why the man would simply plunge into the llano, far from any route where travellers went, puzzled him--and it was while he was walking around in puzzlement that the owl flew out of the ground. A great white owl, with wings as wide as a man's arm spread, suddenly rose right at his feet, in his face. The owl flew from a hole in the ground, near a ridge with a few rocks on it. That the owl flew so near his face frightened Famous Shoes badly--s badly that he stumbled as he tried to run back to camp. His heart began to pound; he had never been so frightened, not even when a brown bear tried to catch him on the Brazos once.
The owl that flew in his face went up high and glided over the rangers--it was snow white.
Of course Famous Shoes knew that little brown owls sometimes went into prairie dog holes to catch snakes, or to eat the young prairie dogs--but this was not such an owl. This owl had been snow white, though it was not winter and there was no reason for a white owl to be rising out of a hole on a ridge. Captain Call and Captain McCrae looked up at it, and then it flew so far that Famous Shoes lost it in the white sunlight.
Of course the owl meant death--thus it had always been. But it was not an ordinary owl, so the death it presaged would not be that of an ordinary man. Though Famous Shoes had been very frightened when the owl flew at him, he soon decided that the owl did not want his death. He was only an ordinary man who liked to lie with his wives when he was home and who liked to travel the country when he had got enough, for a time, of lying with his wives. He was a good tracker, too, but not good enough that his death would need to be announced by the appearance of a great white owl.
It was another death, the death of a great man, that the white owl must have come to announce. Famous Shoes thought that one of the captains, who were great men of the Texans, might be about to die. It could mean that Blue Duck's apparent foolishness in journeying into the llano was in fact just a ruse.
Maybe somewhere ahead he was plotting an ambush.
Maybe he was hiding in a hole somewhere, as the owl had been, waiting to shoot one of the captains.
'Did you see the owl?' Famous Shoes asked, when he reached the captains.
'We seen it, it was right pretty,' Captain McCrae said cheerfully. 'You don't see too many of them big snow owls low down this way now.' Augustus was happy that the troop had been pared down to the men who were necessary, even though it meant that he would have fewer victims in the event of an evening card game.
Famous Shoes realized then, when he heard Captain McCrae's casual and cheerful tone, that it was as he had always believed, which was that it was no use talking to white men about serious things. The owl of death, the most imposing and important bird he had ever seen, had flown right over the two captains' heads, and they merely thought it was a pretty bird. If he tried to persuade them that the bird had come out of the earth, where the death spirits lived, they would just think he was talking nonsense.
Captain Call was no more bothered by the owl than Captain McCrae, a fact which made Famous Shoes decide not to speak. He turned and led them west again, but this time he proceeded very carefully, expecting that Blue Duck might be laying his ambush somewhere not far ahead, in a hole that one would not notice until it was too late.
As her strength began its final ebbing, the thing that tormented Maggie most was the fear in her son's eyes. Newt knew she was dying--everybody knew it. He struggled mightily to relieve her of the household chores. He was an able boy, too: he could cook a little, and clean--if there was a chore to be done that was within his capacity, Maggie seldom had to ask him to do it. He just did it, and did it competently; in that way and many others he reminded her of his father.
Yet it was in thinking of Newt that Maggie found her best peace. She thought she had done a fair job with him. If the rangers or the Stewarts would just take him for a year or two he would be old enough to earn his keep. Maggie hoped it would be the rangers.
