shortsighted that he would sometimes climb on someone else's horse thinking it was his own, could see nothing, but he pulled his rifle just in case.
'What you see is a yucca, or two yuccas,' Blue Duck told Ermoke. He was anxious to press on and catch up with Buffalo Hump, whose track was the track of a weak old man--a man who would die within a day or two.
Blue Duck did not want his father to die before they found him. He was prepared to ignore everything else in order to catch his father before he died.
It was not until they had limped into the Lake of Horses and were drinking at the little spring that Blue Duck finally saw the two Comanches. He decided that thirst had weakened his vision; sitting well to the west, in plain view, were two Comanche warriors. They were not approaching; they were merely watching, but it made Blue Duck more anxious than ever to hurry on with the chase. Then Monkey John's horse lay down and could not rise, no matter how hard they beat him. Blue Duck knew that the Comanches must belong to the Antelope band--Quanah's band. No other Indians would dare venture that far into the llano. They must know of the little spring--perh they were its guardians. If they were there, the rest of the band must not be far.
Blue Duck knew that the Antelope would not consider him a Comanche. If they decided to kill him they would come with enough warriors to kill him, which is why he decided he had better keep Ermoke and Monkey John with him, even if it meant letting them use his spare horses. Both men were reliable shots and three rifles were better than one if it came to a fight with the Antelopes.
They rested for part of a day by the spring in the Lake of Horses; the two Comanches did not approach, but neither did they leave. Blue Duck knew his father could only be a few miles ahead. In an hour or two they could catch him and dispatch him. He wanted the horses to rest and eat. They could fill up on the weeds that grew around the little spring. He did not want to fight the Antelopes unless he had to--it was a fight he would be unlikely to win. He stayed near the spring through the night, until an hour before dawn. He meant to leave before it was light, find his father, kill him, and go north as fast as he could, to strike the Rio Carrizo or the Cimarron.
If he moved quickly enough he would soon be back in the tall grass along the Cimarron; he didn't think the Antelopes would follow him there. If necessary he would kill Ermoke and Monkey John and take the horses they rode --better to ride all the horses to death and hope to ambush a traveller on one of the westward trails than to get into a fight with the Antelopes.
In the morning, when it was light enough to scan the whole plain, Ermoke, who was very nervous, made another discovery: the rangers they thought they had outdistanced had not given up. Not only were the two Comanches still in plain sight to the west, but at least four horsemen were pursuing them from the south.
Seeing this, Ermoke became bitterly annoyed with himself, for following Blue Duck to such a place.
Now there were Comanches on one side and Texas Rangers behind them, in country too dry to live in; and they were there for no better reason than that Blue Duck wanted to settle a grudge with Buffalo Hump.
'We ought to have let him come by himself,' he said, to Monkey John. 'Them two to the west want our hair and the goddamn rangers want to hang us.' Monkey John was too frightened of the Comanches to worry about the rangers.
'I ain't worried about the hanging,' he said.
'There's nothing out here they could hang us from. I'd like to keep my hair, though, if I can.
'Besides that, we're out of tobaccy,' he added, a little later.
'That's because you chewed it all up, you goddamn hog,' Ermoke said. In fact Monkey John, in his opinion, was little more than a human spittoon.
In the back of Monkey John's anxious mind was another worry: Blue Duck. He had not asked them to come on the trip--if the Comanches had not showed up he would probably have left them to starve, and he still might. As they rode north Monkey John found that his worry about Blue Duck overwhelmed his other worries.
'I'm afraid Duck will kill us, once he's done with his pa,' he said to Ermoke, who had stopped for a moment to relieve himself.
Ermoke ignored the comment. His own chief worry was Captain Call, whom he knew to be an implacable foe. He knew that Call must be one of the rangers who were following them--no one else in the ranger troop would have been likely to have pressed a pursuit so tenaciously.
Now, to his vexation, he saw that the rangers had found the dry lake and the spring in the center of it. They had all dismounted to drink and water their horses. It made it difficult to count them, but the count in itself was not too important. If Captain Call was one of the rangers it meant that they had plenty to worry about.
'I'm scared of Duck, he's mean,' Monkey John said, a comment that amused Ermoke a good deal.
'Mean? Duck? Why, when did you notice?' he said, before he turned back north.
Famous Shoes had heard of the spring in the dry lake from one or two old men whose minds had been cloudy when they talked of it. He had not quite believed that it was a real place, and was grateful to the plover for calling and calling until he was able to find it. It was such a small spring that it took more than an hour for the horses to water--Captain Call forbade the men to drink until the horses had had their fill, an order Captain McCrae agreed with.
'We can drink our piss and make it another day or two, but these nags have to water,' Augustus said. Pea Eye and Deets, their tongues thick in their mouths, waited as the two horses drank.
Pea Eye was so thirsty that his head swam.
He had begun to see double, too, a thing that had never occurred before in his life.
While the horses were drinking Augustus spotted the two Comanches. Famous Shoes was a few hundred yards to the west, exploring the edges of the old lake; he too saw the Comanches and came running back.
'We should leave here as soon as we can,' he said. 'Those men may not like it that we have found the spring.' Call could not see the two warriors-- eyesight weaker than the norm, or at least weaker than Augustus's, was an old vexation.
He did not dispute the opinion, though. The Comanches who lived in the depths of the llano still had all their fight, as many an unfortunate traveller had found out to his doom.
'Blue Duck got here first,' Augustus commented. 'If they're feeling frisky maybe they'll take after him.'
