“Gomez,” Captain Salazar said. “He’s toying with us.”
“Untie us, Captain,” Bigfoot said. “Our hands will freeze this way. We’ll fight with you, against the Apache—but we can’t fight if our hands are frozen off. I couldn’t hold a rifle steady now. My hands are too cold.”
Salazar looked back at the stumbling Texans. They were weak and cold, but they still looked stronger than his own men. He knew that Bigfoot Wallace was right. His men wouldn’t go much farther, unless they found food. They would flee toward the mountains, or else simply sit down and die. Gomez was the wolf who would finish them, in his own way.
He knew that if he freed the Texans, and they saw a chance, they would overpower his men, kill them, or else take their guns and leave them to their fate. To free them was to accept a large risk. Yet, at least if it came to battle, the Texans would shoot—they wouldn’t cut and run.
“No white man has ever seen Gomez,” he told Bigfoot. “No Mexican, either. We caught his wife and killed her. We have killed two of his sons. But Gomez we have never seen. He cut my rope, not a yard from my head. And yet I have never seen him.”
“I don’t want to see the fellow,” Bigfoot said. “If I can just avoid him, I’ll be better off.”
“Any Apache can be Gomez,” Salazar said. “He might be dead. His sons might be killing for him now—we only killed two, and he has many. It is hard to fight a man you never see.”
“I’ve seen him,” Bigfoot said.
Salazar was startled. “You’ve seen him?” he asked.
“I dreamed him,” Bigfoot said. “We was on the Rio Grande, trying to lay out the road to El Paso. I was with Major Chevallie—he’s dead now. In my dream I seen Gomez and Buffalo Hump riding together. They were going to attack Chihuahua City and make all your people slaves—the ones they didn’t kill.”
Salazar kept walking.
“I’m glad it was only in Chihuahua City,” he said.
“Why?” Bigfoot asked.
“Because I don’t live in Chihuahua City,” Salazar said. “If they had tried to take Santa Fe they would have done better than you Texans did.”
“I expect so,” Bigfoot said. “Will you untie us, Captain? We won’t fight you. We might help save you.”
“Why is this land without wood?” Salazar asked. “If we had wood and could make fires and be warm, we might survive.”
“Just untie us, Captain,” Bigfoot said. “We wouldn’t be killing these boys of yours. Most of them ain’t but half grown. We don’t kill pups.”
Salazar walked back through the Texans; he saw that they were suffering much, from their bound hands.
“Untie them,” he told his men. “But be watchful. I want the best marksmen to stand guard at night and to flank these men during the day. Shoot them if they try to flee.”
That night, again, there was no fire. All day they had looked for wood, without seeing even a stick. Six riflemen guarded the Texans, with their muskets ready. Late in the night, while Texans and Mexicans alike shivered in their sleep, two of the guards walked off a little ways, to piss.
In the morning their bodies, cut as Johnny Carthage’s had been cut, were found less than fifty yards from camp.
This time there was no hiding the truth, from Gus McCrae or anyone.
“He’s stalking us,” Bigfoot said. “Ain’t that right, Captain?”
“It is time to march,” Salazar said.
3.
FOR THREE DAYS CALL could not put his right foot to the ground. Matilda and Gus took turns supporting him, alternating throughout the day. On the second day the whole company, Mexicans and Texans alike, were so weak they were barely able to stumble along. They made less than ten miles.
“If we can’t make no better time than this, we might as well sit down and die,” Bigfoot said. He himself could have made better time than that, but he did not want to desert his companions—not yet—not until he had to save himself.
In the afternoon of the second day, Jimmy Tweed, the gangly boy, gave up. He had turned his ankle the day before, crossing a shallow gully; now the ankle was so swollen that he could scarcely put his foot to the ground.
Salazar saw Jimmy Tweed sink down, and went over to him at once. He knew that the whole troop was ready to do what Jimmy Tweed had just done—sit down and wait to die. It was an option he could not allow his men, or the Texans, who, though no longer tied, were his captives. If the Texans began to give up, his own men might follow suit, and soon the whole party would be lost.
“Get up, Señor,” Salazar said. “We will make camp soon. You can rest your ankle then.”
“Nope, I’m staying, Captain,” Jimmy Tweed said. “I’d just as soon stop here as a mile or two from here.”
“Señor, I cannot permit it,” Salazar said. “We would all like to stop—but you are a prisoner under guard, and I make the decisions about where we stop.”
Jimmy Tweed just smiled. His lips were blue from the cold. He stared through Salazar, as if the man were not there.
Salazar saw that all his soldiers were watching him. Jimmy Tweed made no effort to stand up and walk. Most of the Texans were some ways ahead; they were not paying attention; each man had his own problems—none had noticed that Jimmy Tweed had stopped.
Wearily, Salazar drew his pistol and cocked it.
“Señor, I will ask you courteously to get up and walk a little farther,” he said. “I would rather not shoot you—but I will shoot you if you do not obey me.”
Jimmy Tweed looked at him—for a moment, he seemed to consider obeying the order. He put his hands on the ground, as if he meant to push himself up. But after a moment, he ceased all effort.
“Too tired, Captain,” he said. “I reckon I’m just too tired.”
“I see,” Salazar said. He walked around behind Jimmy and shot him in the head.
At the shot, all the Texans turned. Jimmy Tweed had pitched forward on his face, dead.
Salazar walked quickly back to where the group waited, staring at the dead body of their comrade, Jimmy Tweed.
“His sufferings are over, Señores,” Salazar said, the pistol still in his hand. “Let’s march.”
The Mexican soldiers made a show of raising their guns, in case the Texans chose to revolt—but in fact, none revolted. Bigfoot colored, as if he were about to be seized with one of his great fits of rage, but he held himself in check. Several of the other Texans looked back at the body, sprawled on the dull sand, but in the main they were too numb to care. Several, whose feet were frozen stumps, felt a moment of envy, mixed with sadness. It was hard to dispute Captain Salazar’s words. Jimmy’s sufferings were over; theirs were not.
“That’s two of us that ain’t been buried proper,” Blackie Slidell said. “I have always supposed I’d be buried proper, but maybe I won’t. There’s no time for funerals, out here on the baldies.”
“Proper—they weren’t buried at all,” Bigfoot said. “Johnny and Jimmy both got left to the varmints.”
Gus had the conviction that they were all going to die. As far as he could see—ahead, behind, or to the side—there was nothing. Just sky and sand. The dead man’s walk was a hell of emptiness. His lips were blue from the cold, and his tongue swollen from thirst. Woodrow Call groaned whenever his broken foot touched the ground—even Matilda Roberts, the strongest spirit in the troop, except for Bigfoot, merely trudged along silently. She had not spoken all day.
Matilda had not looked back, when Jimmy Tweed was shot. She didn’t want to think about Jimmy Tweed, a boy who had been sweet to her on more than one occasion, bringing her coffee from the campfire, helping her saddle Tom, when she still had Tom. Once he had asked her for her favors, but she had bound herself to Shadrach by then, and had turned him down. He pouted like a little boy at being refused, but got over it in an hour and continued to do her little favors. Now she regretted rebuffing him—Shadrach had been asleep and would never have known. Sweet boys rarely knew how little time they had; now Jimmy’s h
ad run out. Matilda put one foot in front of the other, helped Call as much as she could, and trudged on.
That night, Blackie Slidell and six of his chums disappeared. Blackie was of the opinion that there were villages to the west—often he pointed to columns of smoke that no one else could see.
“It’s chimney smoke,” Blackie said, several times; he was hoping to get the company to swing west.
“It ain’t chimney smoke—it ain’t smoke at all—it’s just you hoping,” Bigfoot said. “Gus McCrae has better eyesight than you, and he can’t see no smoke over in that direction.”
“It might be a piece of a cloud,” Gus said. He liked Blackie and didn’t want to flatly contradict him, if he could help it.
Blackie saw that he wasn’t going to be able to convince Bigfoot or Salazar that there were villages to the west. But he had become friendly with six boys from Arkansas, and he had better luck with them.
“Hell, I’d like to live to eat one more catfish from the old Arkansas River,” one of them, a thin youth named Cotton Lovett, said.
“Or maybe one more possum,” Blackie said. He had been down the Arkansas on occasion and remembered that the possums there were fat and easy to catch. The meat of the Arkansas possums was a trifle greasy—several of the Arkansas boys agreed to that—but they were all so hungry that the prospect of grease only made the venture more attractive.
That night, worried about Gomez, Salazar put all his men in a tight circle, facing out, their guns ready. They had crossed a flat lake that afternoon, mainly dry but with just enough smelly puddles to allow the men enough water to boil coffee. Several of the men were already cramping from the effects of the bad water. The Texans had drunk too, and were suffering. Blackie Slidell tried to interest several other men in escaping. He was sure the villages were there. But he found no takers and slipped off about midnight, with the six boys. Call and Gus watched them go—for a moment, Gus felt inclined to go with them, but Call talked him out of it.
“We don’t know much about this country, but we do know the Apaches are that way,” Call reminded him. “That’s one good reason to stay with the troop.”
“I would strike out with the boys, but I’m too cold,” Gus said. “Anyway, I have to get you home. Clara will think poorly of me, if I don’t.”
Call didn’t answer, but he was surprised—not by his friend’s loyalty, but that cold, hungry, lost, and a prisoner, he was still hoping to gain the good opinion of a girl in a general store in Austin. He started to point out what seemed obvious: that the girl had probably forgotten them both, by this time. For all they knew, she could have married. Gus’s hopes of winning her were as far-fetched as Blackie Slidell’s hopes of finding a friendly village somewhere to the west.
He didn’t say that, though; recent experience had shown him that men had to use what hope they could muster, to stay alive.
They sat together through the night, one on either side of Matilda Roberts. For several days the weather had been overcast, but when the dawn came, it was clear. Just seeing the bright sunlight made them feel better, although it was still cold and the prospects still bleak.
Captain Salazar had taken a little of the bad water the day before; he arose so tired and weak that he could scarcely walk to the campfire. When a cramp took him he had to bend almost double to endure the pain.
Bad as he was, his troop was worse. Several of his soldiers were too weak to rise. The fact that seven prisoners had escaped the night before didn’t interest them—nor did it interest Salazar.
“Their freedom will be temporary,” he told Bigfoot.
“How about our freedom, Captain?” Bigfoot asked. “Half your men are dying and half of ours too. What’s the point of keeping us prisoners when we’re all dying? Why can’t you just turn us loose and let it be every man for himself? Maybe one or two of us will make it home, if we do it that way.”
Call and Gus were there—and Long Bill. Captain Salazar could barely stand on his feet. Even a march of one mile might be beyond him, and they had far more than a mile to go. Bigfoot’s request seemed reasonable, to them. If they were let go they might wander off in twos and threes and find food of some sort and live, whereas if the whole troop had to stay together they would probably all starve.
Salazar looked at his troops, many of them unable to rise. He still had at most eight soldiers who could be considered able-bodied men. The Texans had more, but not many more. The end of the dead man’s walk was not in sight—it might be three days away, or four, or even five. He thought for a moment before answering Bigfoot’s request.
He took his pistol out of its holster, checked to see that it was fully loaded, and handed it butt first to Bigfoot Wallace.
“If you want to be free, kill me,” he said.
Bigfoot looked at the sick, exhausted man in astonishment.
“Captain, I must have misheard,” he said.
“No, you heard correctly,” Salazar said. “I have decided that you can be free, if freedom is what you want most. But I am a Mexican officer, under orders to take you to El Paso. There is no one here to countermand my orders, and the General who gave them to me is dead. You saw what the Apaches did to him.”
“Well, Captain, I know that,” Bigfoot said. “But if the General was here and saw how weak we all are, he might change his mind.”
“He might, but we cannot summon him up from hell and ask him,” Salazar said. “My orders are still my orders. I cannot free you. But I will allow you the opportunity to free yourselves. All you have to do is shoot me.”
Bigfoot held the gun awkwardly, not sure what to make of the Captain’s odd decision. He looked at Call, at Gus, at Long Bill Coleman, and at Matilda Roberts. Now and then, throughout their time as prisoners, any one of them would have been happy to have the opportunity to kill Captain Salazar. When Call was being whipped, when they were chained, when Jimmy Tweed was shot—at such moments any of them might have killed him. But Salazar was no longer the cold Captain who chained them or tied them at his whim. He had suffered the same cold and the same hunger as they had, drunk the same bad water and been weakened by the same cramps. He was a weakened man, so weakened that he had calmly ordered his own death.
“Captain, I don’t want to shoot you,” Bigfoot said. “At times I could have done it easy, I expect, but now you’re worse off than we are. I’ve got no stomach for shooting you now.”
Salazar stood his ground. He looked the Texans over.
“If not you, then another,” he offered. “Perhaps Corporal Call would shoot me. He endured the lash, and life has not been easy for him since. Surely he would like revenge. His feet are giving him pain, and yet I have kept him walking. Give him the gun.”
“Caleb Cobb broke my feet,” Call said. “You didn’t. I’d shoot you if this was a fight, but I ain’t gonna just take your damn gun and shoot you down.”
“Corporal McCrae?” Salazar said. “Surely you hate me enough to shoot me,” Salazar said, with a small smile.
“I used to, Captain, but I’m too cold and too tired to worry about shooting anybody,” Gus said. “I’d just like to go home and get married quick.”
Call was annoyed that once again the subject of marriage had come up, and at a time when a man’s life was in the balance. They had no prospect of even getting home—why was he so convinced the girl would marry him, even if they did?
Salazar took his pistol back, and walked over to Matilda Roberts. He held the gun out to her.
“Kill me, Señorita,” he said. “Then you will all be free.”
“Free to what?” Matilda asked. “It ain’t you I need to be freed of—I ain’t a prisoner, anyway. What I’d like to be free of is this damn desert, and shooting you won’t accomplish that.”
“Then shoot me just for vengeance,” Salazar said. “Shoot me to avenge your dead.”
“I won’t—they all died from foolishness,” Matilda said. “All except my Shad—my Shad died from being in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Shoo
ting you won’t bring him back, or make me miss him no less.”
Captain Salazar took the pistol, and put it back in its holster.
“Caleb Cobb would have shot you, if he was here,” Bigfoot said, almost apologetically. He thought it bold of Salazar to take the risk he had just taken—any Texan, in the right mood, might have shot him. Of course, the Captain was as tired and hungry as the rest of them; his neck wound had never healed properly—there was pus on his collar. Perhaps he felt his end was coming, and wanted to hasten it. Still, it was bold. A man could perhaps and perhaps all day, and not find his way to the truth.
“Yes—no doubt—he did shoot me,” Salazar said. “But in that, too, he failed.”
Then he gingerly felt his neck—he looked, with a grimace, at the stain on his hand.
“Perhaps I am wrong,” he said. “Perhaps he didn’t fail. Perhaps he merely wanted me to walk two hundred hard miles before I died.”
“He was blind at the time, Captain,” Bigfoot said. “He just made a lucky shot—I expect he would have been happy to kill you where you stood.”
Captain Salazar sighed—he looked for a moment at his weary troops.
“All right,” he said. “Unfortunately you did not accept my terms, so you are still my prisoners. If you had killed me, I would have been a martyr—now I will only be disgraced.”
“Not in my eyes—not if you’re talking about military work,” Bigfoot said. “You done your best and you’re still doing it. You took on a hard job. I doubt Caleb Cobb would have even got us this far.”
“I agree with that,” Salazar said. “I have done my best, and Colonel Cobb would not have got you this far. He would have left, to banquet with the generals and perhaps seduce their wives.”
He gestured for his soldiers to get up. Two or three merely stared at him, but most of them began to struggle to their feet.
“Unfortunately, you are not a Mexican officer, Señor Wallace,” Salazar said. “You are not one of the men who will judge me. I lost most of my men and many of my prisoners. That is what the generals will notice, when I deliver you to El Paso. Where are the rest, they will ask.”
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 37