into those empty tracks and embark on the next trip out come trading season.
When he thought on it, Jonah had to admit he really knew little more than he had four or five years ago. Only now Jonah was certain that the boys were not among those Mexicans—they were held by a band of Comanche. Every bit as bewildering, perhaps, as looking for a particular outfit of comanchero traders was looking across this trackless waste for the comings and goings of a particular band of horse Indians. True, he had learned to track and read sign, to tell if he was following a village on the move fleeing soldiers or a war party riding out to avenge themselves on far-flung settlements.
Later that spring Jonah finally admitted to himself that he did not know how to find any one single band of the Comanche.
Spring slipped into the first warming days of early summer as they left Fort Concho and crossed the Rio Colorado, moving north for the headwaters of the Brazos. The two were traveling lighter now, trading a Danite saddle if they could, a belt gun if they had to, to buy beans and bacon, flour and coffee, along with those twists and plugs of tobacco gone black as sorghum molasses in the tin cases sutlers opened for smoke-hungry travelers come in from the sun and the dust of the western prairie.
The Fort Concho trader had eyed Jonah’s rifle with envy as he stacked the horseman’s provisions on the counter to begin his total. He was a pie-faced man of simple features, most certainly a face nothing usually happened to. “That a sixty-six Winchester, ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is. But it ain’t for sale.” Jonah had long hesitated selling his own, or a single one of the rifles taken from the Danites years before.
The trader shifted his approving gaze at the Spencer carbine Two Sleep carried. “Give you top dollar for that repeater the Indian’s carrying. Ask anyone in these parts—they’ll tell you. I give a man top dollar for good weapons.”
Hook wagged his head, determined not to be taken in. The pistols they could let go for the food and cartridges and smoke, if need be and they ran out of scrip money. “Gonna hang on to our saddle guns, mister. Trade you some army belt guns if the price works out.”
“Got enough belt guns to do me,” the Concho sutler replied sourly, his mouth pinched up in sudden anger. “Just remember, you’ll never get a better price for them rifles than I’ll give you here, and now.”
“Just tell me what these here provisions gonna cost—and I’ll pay you in coin.”
The trader leaned back a bit in admiration, the furrows between his eyes softening. “Not in army scrip, eh?”
“No paper money: so take your cut off what you usually charge for scrip. I got a few pieces of gold.”
With a smack of his lips, the sutler put his pencil to work on his pad. Jonah wanted to pay and be gone, getting farther north where someone might be more willing to answer questions about what lay out there in the immense beyond, where a man would likely find the wandering warrior bands, which creeks and streams and rivers they haunted. Hereabouts the soldiers spent a lot of tongue wagging telling him much of nothing useful. Seemed the army was every bit as intent on keeping white folks out of the Llano Estacado as were those Comanche horsemen.
What with them pushing north just like the tribes that were following the buffalo herds into the summer winds, to be gone from the forts and still have all those rifles strapped behind them on the pack animals, it was a wise thing, having those weapons that might well come in handy one day, Hook figured. Might well make the difference between him wearing his hair or losing it if things came down to making a fight with a band of these elusive Comanche. Might and firepower it was, the language of these southern plains: a matter of simply having more lead and powder and repeating weapons than a man’s unseen enemy.
When it came down to a real fight of it, Jonah figured to be ready.
By midsummer they had left Fort Concho behind, having crossed and recrossed the southern half of west Texas. By then Hook had finally come of the conclusion that it would take a stroke of real luck for him to run across the path of that particular band holding his two boys prisoner. Perhaps, he decided, it would take more than any pure gut-strung, man-made luck from here on out.
Bound to take something more on the order of a godsent miracle.
Tall One was clearly a man now: in his sixteenth summer already, lean and gangly, made all of sinew and bone and wrapped with skin cured to a rich brown hue. He liked the way some of the girls looked at him behind their black eyelashes. But he would wait. Enough time for marrying, he thought.
Antelope, now he was another matter altogether. Tall One’s younger brother had eyes for the girls and talked incessantly about girls, about marrying, about starting a family and raising his children in the way of the Kwahadi.
Perhaps to marry and have children would be Antelope’s way of proving himself to the band, in that way to show that he had truly become one of them, had married one of their daughters and begun fathering Kwahadi children. More important, he was fathering Kwahadi warriors to keep up the struggle against the white man. Yes, perhaps Antelope wanted to begin having sons of his own to prove to the rest that he was no longer white.
Or perhaps it was nothing more than Antelope liked girls.
Tall One himself would grow hard at times thinking about girls, looking at their bodies when he came upon some of them bathing in a river pool. This past spring Antelope had coupled with an older girl who desired him as a partner. Tall One had laughed at that, until the girl also presented herself to Antelope’s big brother.
He had been more than a little afraid of the girl, of her father, of this coupling and what it meant to father a child. Frightened, Tall One had run away from her and ever since had never failed to believe Antelope’s stories about the girls in camp. Only fourteen summers and Antelope was already possessed with the prowess of a man. It was whispered among the boys that many girls boasted that Antelope was an admirable lover.
Still, Tall One was the fighter. He had already killed two men. Funny to think about it, but Antelope was the one who sang his praises even more than Tall One sang of his own exploits in battle against the Tonkawa and the Caddo, against the white man and his pony soldiers. His young brother bragged on him more than he would have ever boasted on himself. Riding into battle was something Antelope had not yet done, though he had accompanied many a raiding party. Instead of scalps, Antelope had returned with ponies and some of the white man’s cattle to his credit.
“I want a scalp,” Antelope said many times.
“Here, take mine.” Tall One tried joking his brother, gathering his hair in one hand and pulling it upward, straight over the crown of his head. He drew the index finger on the other hand around the scalp lock as if slashing it off with a knife.
At first it had been funny to offer his own hair to his brother. Then, sometime this past winter, it had ceased being something to laugh at. Antelope had lost his sense of humor. He had even swung his short bow at Tall One, catching his older brother across the cheek and laying open the skin in a long gash where the browned skin lay taut over the bone. Still, it was more the wounded look on Antelope’s face that brought pain to Tall One.
He never joked about taking scalps again. No more did he offer his own to Antelope.
Whereas Tall One could wait to become a man in the blankets with one of these squat Comanche women, young Antelope was impatient to fully become a man by taking the scalp of the enemy.
“No, I don’t want to go with you to find a Tonkawa,” Antelope snarled when Tall One suggested the two of them go on their own raid into the land of the tribe that served as guides and trackers for the pony soldiers.
“You want to wait to go with many others?” Tall One had asked, wondering if his young brother might still be frightened.
“No,” Antelope said severely. “I don’t want an Indian scalp. I want the hair of a white man to hang from my belt.”
It would be the last time. Tall One vowed, that he would offer to take his brother on a raid. Better that someone else go with Antelope when he took his scalp. Perhaps his young brother did not remember much of what had gone before after all this time. More than eight summers now might make him forget. After all, they had been so young. Antelope … Zeke, yes! Zeke had been so young.
