In the cold, bitter, hungry days that followed, many more voices took up the questions as the Antelope People argued among themselves.
“Should now we be forced to walk the road those Shahiyena and Kiowa take? To follow their steps to the reservation, where the Kwahadi have never retreated, forced to turn over our weapons just so our starving women and children have something to fill their empty bellies now that these winter winds come slashing across the cold breast of our land? How do we expect the little ones, the old ones, and those who are sick to face this onslaught of winter bravely without lodges and blankets and robes, even spare moccasins for their frozen feet—when all was left behind?”
Time had altered their way of life as much as had the white man.
In the nine winters Tall One had spent with the Kwahadi, he had seen the tribe teeter, then slip, from their one-time greatness. No more did they roam in such numbers. Summer after summer of warfare against the growing legions of yellow-legs, winter after winter as they hunted the disappearing buffalo—it took its toll year after year after year. One had only to look around him to see that the number of lodges had been whittled down by nearly half. Yet something in these proud people kept them alive and off the reservation that winter.
They raised their crude shelters in the arroyos, out of the wind, until they could find enough old bulls to begin curing lodge skins once more. Again they hunted antelope and deer for clothing and moccasins. The few ponies they had escaped with had to be cared for more watchfully than ever, for those animals would allow the tribe’s finest horse thieves to strike once more come spring. Soon they would ride out as the grass shoved its first green shoots from the winter-weary ground.
Once the weather began to moderate, they broke into six small groups, Antelope riding with one of the four scouting parties sent off to wander in search of buffalo and to clear the path for those to come. The other two warrior societies escorted the women and old ones, stayed with the children who rode atop the few drags they had left. The strongest of the women pulled the travois now, the ponies gone with the warriors, gone with the hunters. Antelope’s wife struggled as best she could, young and strong as she was with one child barely walking, another infant lashed in a blanket at her back as they plodded north, waiting for spring.
Because he had chosen to stay with the village, Tall One too used the growing strength of his back to drag a travois across the cold ground. Atop the bundles on that travois sat his young nephew, wide-eyed and silent. More and more the face of Antelope’s firstborn reminded Tall One of his mother.
And because the village traveled so slow those last cold days of winter, Tall One was one of the last to know. It was Antelope who brought the news late of an early spring day as his warrior society rode back to rejoin the main village. What news they carried proved momentous.
“Soldiers?” asked Tall One.
“No,” Antelope answered his brother’s question. “But they are white men. Three-times-ten. With two mules along and many, many guns.”
“How close are they from catching us?”
“Two, maybe three days at the most.”
“Another bunch come in from the west, Cap’n,” Jonah told Lockhart.
“That makes how many now, Sergeant?”
Coffee consulted the small hand-stitched, leather-bound tablet he carried inside a vest pocket. “Near as we can count the tracks of them parties we’ve run across—we’re closing on seventy-five or eighty warriors now.”
“Sniffing up their hind ends you mean!” roared June Callicott.
Most of the rest laughed uneasily. It was better to laugh, Jonah knew, knowing they were already outnumbered three to one if things came down to a fight of it. And why wouldn’t things end up just that way? That was, after all, why Captain Lockhart’s men were trailing these Kwahadi, wasn’t it? To make a fight of it? But no one said anything of the odds. Though it might be there plain as paint on their faces if a man looked hard enough, long enough—no one said a goddamned thing about the odds that grew more stacked against them every day they dogged that Comanche trail.
“How many more you figure on joining up?” Lockhart asked.
Hook shrugged. “No telling. This could be most of the warriors. Could be just a small scouting party sent out to roam over this country.”
“What’s your guess?”
“I’d hate to hazard a guess, Cap’n.”
“Hazard one, Mr. Hook,” Lockhart snapped, the tension of trailing the Comanche finally placing cracks in the captain’s implacable exterior.
“All right. Were it up to me, I’d figure this is about half of what warriors there be in the village.”
“This half meaning seventy-five or eighty?”
“Yes, Cap’n.” As he said it, Jonah felt the palpable hush fall over the rest of those men as they sat their saddles stoically.
“We might face maybe as many as a hundred fifty, Mr. Hook?”
“Maybe.”
Lockhart swallowed that one like he had been given a woolly worm to eat. Still, he straightened, and tugged down the front of his wide-brimmed hat before he said, “Men, if we prepare for the worst that things could possibly be, then nothing can deter us from the success of our mission.”
The captain had looked at Jonah for a moment, as if measuring the plainsman one more time, as if to ascertain something before committing Company C to the do or die of it.
Then Lamar Lockhart quietly said, “Sergeant Coffee—we have Comanche to track. Put out our scouts and let’s get moving.”
There wasn’t a grumble, not a word one as Coffee put that outfit into motion again. Nothing but the creak of saddle and holster leather, the plodding of hooves and the silence of men in their own thoughts of what lay ahead. Still, one thing was plain as the sky overhead: Hook could see that this bunch would follow their captain not only to hell and back again, but six times around the devil on the way.
A good leader was like that, able to lead men against daunting odds where a lesser man couldn’t budge his troops. It was just the way a certain gentleman general had led the fight of the Confederacy through all its battles, over all those years. In the end these sons of Texas shared the same feelings about just such a leader as Robert E. Lee, gone peacefully to the ages barely five years after he had handed U.S. Grant his sword at McLean’s farmhouse. These sons of Texas followed a good man in Lamar Lockhart. Bound to follow him now into the jaws of hell.
A February sun continued its climb toward midsky, then fell back to their left as they pressed on, the trail they were following become fresher, the fire pits a bit warmer, the pony dung not near so dry. It was late afternoon when
Hook in turn pushed his horse ahead until he rode beside Lockhart. “Cap’n, seems we’ve found something ahead.”
“Your Snake?”
“He run onto a Comanche pony. Calls the Comanche ’yellow jackets.’”
“Let’s go have ourselves a look, Jonah.”
After crossing the crest of that last hill, Hook spotted the animal more than half a mile away, even before Two Sleep pointed.
“I see him,” Lockhart said without being asked.
The miserable creature stood with its head hung among the refuse of an old campsite: a pitiful few rings, many fire pits, scraps of meat and hide and ruddled bone the porcupines and magpies continued to work over until the white men drew too close and stopped. Only then did the predators and scavengers scatter, and all was silent again, save for the hiss of the wind in the scrub cedar and the bare, skeletal branches of the mesquite.
Jonah’s eyes followed the moccasin tracks, the growing number of hoofprints. Another bunch had evidently joined up here at this campsite. And still the village moved north, rejoining in anticipation of the spring hunt. He gazed off at the path scoured in their leaving this place: a trail more than thirty feet wide pointing toward the Pease
