He walked another mile, and then mounted the Buffalo Horse and rode slowly to where he had left Three Birds. He did not want to gallop, not yet. None of the rangers were alert enough to pick up a horse's gallop at that distance, but Famous Shoes was there, and he might put his ear to the ground and hear the gallop.
Three Birds was in some kind of trance when Kicking Wolf rode up to him. Three Birds had their horses ready, but he himself was sitting on a blanket, praying. The man often prayed at inconvenient times. When he looked up from his prayer and saw Kicking Wolf coming on the Buffalo Horse all he said was, 'Ho!' 'I have stolen the Buffalo Horse,' Kicking Wolf said. 'You shouldn't be sitting on that dirty blanket praying. You should be making a good song about what I have done tonight. I went to the Buffalo Horse while he was making water, and I stole him. When Big Horse Scull gets up in the morning he will be so angry he will want to make a great war on us.' Three Birds thought that what Kicking Wolf said was probably true. Scull would make a great war, because his horse had been stolen. He immediately stopped praying and caught his horse.
'Let's go a long way now,' he said.
'All those Texans will be chasing us, when it gets light.' 'We will go a long way, but don't forget to make the song,' Kicking Wolf said.
'Genius! it's absolute genius!' Inish Scull said, when told that his great warhorse, Hector, had been stolen. 'The man took Hector right out from under my nose. The other horses, now that took skill. But stealing Hector? That's genius!' It was hardly the reaction the rangers had expected. The four men on guard at the time-- Long Bill Coleman, Pea Eye Parker, Neely Dickens, and Finch Seeger--were lined up with hangdog looks on their faces. All of them expected the firing squad; after all, they had let the most important horse in Texas get stolen.
None of them had seen or heard a thing, either.
The big horse had been grazing peacefully the last time they had looked. They had been expecting Kicking Wolf to try for the other horses. It hadn't occurred to any of them that he might steal the big horse.
'You should have expected it!' Call told them sternly, when the theft was discovered. 'He might be big, but he was still a horse, and horses are what Kicking Wolf steals.' Augustus McCrae, like Captain Scull, could not suppress a sneaking admiration for Kicking Wolf's daring. It was a feat so bold it had to be credited, and he told Woodrow as much.
'I don't credit it,' Call said. 'It's still just a thief stealing a horse. We ought to be chasing him, instead of standing around talking about it.' 'We've been chasing him off and on for ten years and we ain't caught him,' Gus pointed out. 'The man's too fleet for us. I'd like to see you go into Buffalo Hump's camp and steal one of his horses sometime.' 'I don't claim to be a horse thief,' Call said. 'The reason we don't catch him is because we stop to sleep and he don't.' Call felt a deep irritation at what had happened. The irritation was familiar; he had felt it almost every time they had gone after the Comanches. In a direct conflict they might win, if the conflict went on long enough for their superior weaponry to prevail. But few engagements with the Comanche involved direct conflict. It was chase and wait, thrust and parry--and, always, the Comanches concentrated on what they were doing while the rangers usually piddled. Their own preparations were seldom thorough, or their tactics precise--the Comanches were supposed to be primitive, yet they fought with more intelligence than the rangers were usually able to muster. It irked Call, and had always irked him. He resolved that if he ever got to be a captain he would plan better and press the enemy harder, once a battle was joined.
Of course the force they had to deploy was not large. Captain Scull, like Buffalo Hump, preferred to mount a small, quick, mobile troop. Yet in Call's view there was always something ragtag about the ranger forces he went out with. Some of the men would always be drunk, or in love with a whore, or deep into a gambling frenzy when the time came to leave; they would be left behind while men who were barely skilled enough to manage town life would join up, wanting a grand adventure. Also, the state of Texas allotted little money for the ranger force--now that the Comanches had stopped snatching children from the outskirts of Austin and San Antonio, the legislature saw no need to be generous with the rangers.
'They don't need us anymore, the damn politicians,' Augustus said. He had become increasingly resentful of all forms of law and restraint. The result of the legislature's parsimonious attitude toward frontier defense meant that the rangers often had to set out on a pursuit indifferently mounted and poorly provisioned. Often, like the Indians they were pursuing they had to depend on hunting--or even fishing--in order to survive until they could get back.
Now, though, Kicking Wolf had stolen the big horse, and all Captain Scull could think of to do was call him a genius.
'What is a genius, anyway?' Augustus asked, addressing the question to the company at large.
'I guess the Captain's a genius, you ought to ask him,' Call said.
The Captain, at the moment, was walking around with Famous Shoes, attempting to discover how the theft had been accomplished.
'A genius is somebody with six toes or more on one foot,' Long Bill declared. 'That's what I was told at home.' Neely Dickens, a small, reedy man prone to quick darting motions that reminded Gus of minnows, took a different view.
'Geniuses don't have no warts,' he claimed.
'In that case I'm a genius because I am rarely troubled with warts,' Augustus said.
'I've heard that geniuses are desperate smart,' Teddy Beatty said. 'I met one once up in St. Louis and he could spell ^ws backwards and even say numbers backwards too.' 'Now, what would be the point of spelling backwards?' Augustus asked. 'If you spell backwards you wouldn't have much of a ^w. I expect you was drunk when you met that fellow.' Finch Seeger, the largest and slowest man in the company when it came to movement, was also the slowest when it came to thinking. Often Finch would devote a whole day to one thought--the thought that he wanted to go to a whorehouse, for example. He did not take much interest in the question of geniuses, but he had no trouble keeping an interest in food. Deets had informed the company that there was only a little bacon left, and yet they were a long way from home. The prospect of baconless travel bored into Finch's mind like a screwworm, so painfully that he was moved to make a comment.
'Pig,' he said, to everyone's surprise.
'I wish we had us a good fat pig.' 'Now Finch, keep quiet,' Augustus said, though the comment was the only ^w Finch Seeger had uttered in several days.
'No one was discussing swine,' Gus added.
'No one was discussing anything,' Call remarked. 'Finch has as much right to talk as you have.' Finch ignored the controversy his remark had ignited. He looked across the empty prairie and his mind made a picture of a fat pig. The pig was nosing around behind a chaparral bush, trying to root out a mouse, or perhaps a snake. He meant to be
