Now Buffalo Hump had heard that there was a young chief of the Antelope band—his name was Quanah. Though scarcely more than a boy he was said to be a great fighter, decisive and terrible in battle, a horseman and hunter, one who had no fear either of the whites or of the country. The talk was that Quanah was half white, the son of Peta Nocona and the captive Naduah, who had been with the Comanche for many years. She had been taken in a raid near the Brazos when Buffalo Hump himself had been young. Naduah had been with the People so long that she had forgotten that she was a captive—now her son led the Antelope Comanches and kept his people far from the whites and their councils.
When Buffalo Hump asked about Quanah, Kicking Wolf did not answer immediately. The subject seemed to annoy him.
“I took him four good horses but he didn’t want them,” he said, finally.
“Did you try to fool him?” Buffalo Hump asked. “I remember that you used to try and trade me bad horses. You only wanted to trade the horses there was something wrong with. Maybe Quanah is too smart for you. Maybe he knew those horses had something wrong with them.”
Kicking Wolf immediately rose and prepared to leave.
“There was nothing wrong with the horses I took him, or with the horses I traded you, either,” he said. “Someday Quanah will wish he had horses as good as those I took him.”
Then he walked away, to the embarrassment of Heavy Leg and Lark, who had been preparing to offer him some of the coon—that was the polite thing to do. When Buffalo Hump visited Kicking Wolf he always politely ate a little of what Kicking Wolf’s wives had prepared. He was a good guest—he did not simply get up and leave just as the meal was ready. Lark and Heavy Leg were afraid they might have done something to offend their guest. Perhaps he was forbidden to eat coon? They didn’t know what to think, but they were fearful. If they had erred, Buffalo Hump would surely beat them—since his sickness he was often in a bad temper and beat them for the smallest errors in the management of the lodge. They knew that the beatings mainly came about because Buffalo Hump was old and ill, but they were severe beatings anyway, so severe that it behooved them to be as careful as possible.
This time, though, Buffalo Hump merely ate his food; he said nothing to his wives. It amused him that Kicking Wolf was annoyed with Quanah, the young war chief of the Antelopes, just because he was a good judge of horseflesh. It only impressed Buffalo Hump more, that Quanah had refused to trade with Kicking Wolf. Living where he lived, on the llano, where the distances to be traveled were great and the forage sparse, a war chief could not afford to make mistakes about horses. If a horse’s feet were poor it might imperil the success of a hunt, and the People’s survival depended on the hunt.
Of course, Kicking Wolf was notorious—and had been throughout his whole career as a thief—for attempting to trade off horses that looked like fine horses but that had one hard-to-detect flaw. Perhaps a given horse was deficient in endurance, or had no wind, or had hooves that were prone to splitting. Kicking Wolf was skilled at glossing over flaws that only a man with an experienced eye could see. There was a way of knowing that some men had and some men didn’t. Kicking Wolf could watch a horse graze for a few minutes and know whether he was watching a good horse. But fewer and fewer could do that. Buffalo Hump had never been an exact appraiser of horseflesh himself. What he knew was that Kicking Wolf was tricky and that he ought to be wary of the horses that Kicking Wolf praised the most.
It amused him to think that this boy, this half-white war chief, Quanah, might know the same thing: that Kicking Wolf was sly, too sly to be easily trusted when it came to horses.
19.
NADUAH WAS NURSING the child when the other women began to scream. She had been dreaming while the little girl nursed, dreaming of the warm lodge they could build if Peta was successful in the hunt and brought some good skins for her to clean and tan. The men had left early, to hunt—only an hour before, Peta had been there.
There were a few slaves in the camp, young Kickapoos who had been caught only a week before. The white men charging at them on the horses were shooting the young slaves, thinking they were warriors. Before Naduah could run, the Texans were all around her. Her little girl, Flower, was a speedy child; she was almost two years old and could run as fast as any of the little children in the camp.
Before Naduah could flee, Flower dropped the breast and ran, crazed with fear of the Texans. She almost ran under one of the charging horses, but the rider pulled up just in time. The wind was up—dust swirled through the camp. In the confusion, with the dust blinding them, the Texans were shooting at anyone who ran, whether woman or slave. Naduah only wanted to catch her child before one of the horses injured her. Her hope was that Peta and the other hunters would hear the shooting and come back to attack the Texans.
Just as Naduah caught up with her little girl she turned and saw two men aiming rifles at her. They were going to shoot her down. The wind blew her clothes away from her legs. She held tightly to Flower, regretting that there was no time to hide her. If she could just hide the child well, then even if she herself were killed the men would return and find her. Flower would live.
Naduah thought death was coming, but the first man suddenly lifted his rifle and put out his hand to keep the other Texan from shooting. The first rider jumped off his horse and grabbed Naduah, to pull her aside so that none of the Texans would ride her down or shoot her. Some of the other women had been killed, and others were fleeing with their children. Naduah tried to pull free and run, but the man who held her was strong; though she fought and scratched she could not break free.
When the shooting stopped several of the Texans gathered around her—their smell was terrible. They peered into her eyes and rubbed her skin. One even lifted her garments to stare at her legs. Naduah thought rape was coming, the rape that many women experienced when a camp was invaded. The Texans kept rubbing her skin, arguing with one another. Naduah thought they were only arguing about who would rape her first, but the men didn’t rape her. Instead, they began to make plans to take her with them—when Naduah saw what they were about she began to scream and try to free herself. She could not stand the touch of a Texan: their breath smelled like the breath of animals and their eyes were cruel. Naduah screamed and fought; when she got a hand free she began to rake at herself, clawing at her breast to make herself bloody and ugly, so the Texans would leave her to run away with the other women. She knew Peta would come back, if she could only find a hiding place where she could wait for him.
The Texans would not free her, though. They tied her hands and put her on a horse, but Naduah immediately rolled off and ran a few steps before the Texans caught her again. This time, when they put her on the horse, they tied her feet under the horse’s belly, so she could not get free. Some of the men rode off rapidly toward the west, in the direction Peta had gone with the other hunters. Naduah hoped that Peta was too far away for the Texans to catch. There were too many Texans for Peta and the few hunters to fight. Other warriors had already taken the stolen horses north—it was mainly the horses that the Texans wanted.
Soon the riders came back and the Texans began to ride south. Naduah screamed and struggled with her bonds. She wanted the Texans to leave her. Two women lay dead at the edge of the camp, shot by the Texans in the first charge. But Naduah was tied to the horse and could not escape. She wished she could be dead, like the women whose bodies she had seen. She thought it would be better to be dead than to be taken by the Texans, men whose breath smelled like the breath of beasts.
20.
“SHE MIGHT BE the Parker girl,” Goodnight said, as they rode away from the Comanche camp. The blue-eyed woman tied to the horse behind them screamed as if her life were ending. Call had his doubts about taking the woman back; even Goodnight, who led the horse she was on, seemed to have his doubts. All of them had seen what happened when captive white women were returned to white society. Grief was what happened, and the longer the captivity the less likely it was that th
e women could accept what they would have to face, or be accepted even by the families who had wanted them back. Most of the returned captives soon died.
“The Parker girl was taken twenty-five years ago,” Call reminded Goodnight. “Comanche women themselves mostly don’t live that long. I doubt any white woman could survive it.”
“I know I couldn’t survive twenty-five years in one of their camps,” Augustus said. “If I couldn’t get to a saloon now and then I’d pine away.”
He said it in jest, hoping to lighten the general mood, but the jest failed. The mood was grim and stayed grim. They had killed six Comanche women as they charged into the camp; they had also killed three Kickapoo captives who were only boys. It was not their practice to kill women or the young, but the men were frightened, the dust was bad, and they knew there was a band of Comanche hunters in camp or not far away. At such times fear and blood lust easily combined—it was impossible to control nervous, frightened men in such a situation; men, in particular, who had good reason to hate all Comanches. Except for the new soldiers there was scarcely a man in the troop who had not lost loved ones in the Comanche raids.
Killing women left a bad taste in the mouth. But the deed was done: they had killed six. The women were dead. There was nothing to do but go home.
They were all troubled by the woman’s screaming, and by the way she ripped at her breast when she saw that they meant to take her. Despite her blue eyes and white skin, the poor woman thought she was Comanche; she wanted to stay with the people she felt and believed to be her own. Taking captive women back was not a duty any of the men could be sure of or be easy with. Of course, leaving a white woman with the Comanches would have been just as hard and left them just as uneasy.
“She doesn’t know English,” Goodnight said. “She’s been with them so long she’s forgot it.”
“In that case it would be a mercy to shoot her,” Call said. “She’ll never be right in the head.”
“I don’t know why you think she’s the Parker girl, Charlie,” Augustus said. “That girl was taken before I was even a ranger, and I can’t even remember what I was before I started being a ranger.”
“You were a loafer,” Call said, though he agreed with Gus’s point. Sometimes Goodnight’s opinions irritated him. The poor woman could be anybody, yet Goodnight had convinced himself that she was the long-lost Parker girl, the mother, some said, of Quanah, the young war chief of the Antelope band, a warrior few white men had ever seen.
“I know the Parkers, that’s why I think it,” Goodnight said. “I’ve been around Parkers ever since I came to Texas, and this woman looks like Parker to me.”
“Even if she was born a Parker, she’s a Comanche now—and she’s got a Comanche child,” Augustus said. “Call’s right—it would be a mercy to shoot her.”
Goodnight didn’t argue further. He saw no point; there was no clear right to be argued. The captive was a white-skinned woman with blue eyes; she had not been born a Comanche. They could neither shoot her nor leave her. He knew, as did Call and McCrae, that only sorrow awaited her in the settlements of the whites. It was a hard thing. The white families, of course, thought they wanted their captive loved ones back—they thought it right up until the moment when rangers or soldiers did actually return some poor, ragged, dirty, wild captive to them, a person who, likely as not, had not been washed, except by the rains, since the moment they had been stolen. If the captivity had lasted more than a month or two, the person the families got back was never the person they had lost. The change was too violent, the gap opened between new life and old too wide to be closed.
Call said no more about the white woman, either. He knew they were saving her merely to kill her by tortures different from those the Indians practiced. He could take no pride in recovering captives, unless, by a rapid chase, the rangers were able to recover them within a few days of their capture; only those who had been freshly taken ever flourished once they were returned.
As usual he rode homeward off the plains with a sense of incompletion. They had fought three violent skirmishes and acquitted themselves well. Some livestock had been recovered, though most of the stolen horses had escaped them. Several Comanche warriors had been killed, with the loss of only one ranger, Lee Hitch, who had lagged behind to pick persimmons and had strayed right into a Comanche hunting party. They shot him full of arrows, scalped him, mutilated him, and left; by the time his friend Stove Jones went back and found him the Comanches had cut the track of the ranger troop and fled to the open plains, joining the horsethieves in their flight. Stove Jones was incoherent with grief—in the space of an hour he had lost his oldest friend.
“Them persimmons weren’t even ripe yet, either,” Stove said—he was to repeat the same bewildered comment for years, whenever the name of Lee Hitch came up. That his friend had got himself butchered over green persimmons was a fact that never ceased to haunt him.
Call regretted the loss too. An able ranger had made a single mistake in a place where a single mistake was all it took to finish a man. It was the kind of thing that could have happened to Augustus, if whiskey bottles grew on bushes, like persimmons.
What troubled him continually was the impossibility of protecting hundreds of miles of frontier with just a small troop of men. The government had been right to build a line of forts, but now the civil war was rapidly draining those forts of soldiers. The frontier was almost as unprotected as it had been in the forties, when he and Augustus had first taken up the gun.
The Comanches had been in retreat, demoralized, sick, hungry—a few aggressive campaigns would have eliminated them as a threat to white settlement; but now, because of the war, progress had been checked. With so few fighting men to oppose them, the Comanches would raid again at will, picking and choosing from the little exposed ranches and farms. There had just been reports that a young chief had even ridden down the old war trail into Mexico, destroying three villages and costing the Mexicans many children.
It left Call with such a sense of futility that he and Augustus had even begun to talk of doing something else. They rarely had even fifty men under their command at any one time. Though the Comanches were comparatively weak, the rangers were weaker still.
Meanwhile, to the south and west, the banditry raged unchecked. The more prominent cattlemen of south Texas—men such as Captain King—were virtually at war with their counterparts in Mexico, forced to employ large bands of well-mounted and well-armed riflemen in order to hold their ground.
To the east, where the war raged, the tide of battle was uncertain; no one could say whether North or South would win. Even those partisans in Austin who regarded General Lee as second only to the Almighty had muted their bragging now. The struggle was too desperate—no one knew what would happen.
What Call did know was that his own men were tired. They had more ground to cover than any one group of men could reasonably be expected to cover, and, despite many promises, their mounts were still inadequate. Governors and legislators wanted the hostiles held in check and the bandits hung, but they wanted it all to be done with the fewest possible men on the cheapest possible horses. It irritated Call and infuriated Augustus.
“If I could I’d strike a deal with old Buffalo Hump,” Augustus said at one point—admittedly he was well in his cups—“I’d bring him down and turn him loose in the legislature. If he scalped about half the damn senators I have no doubt they’d vote to let us buy some good horses.”
“How could they vote if they were dead?” Call asked.
“Oh, there’d soon be more legislators,” Gus said. “I’d make the new ones dig the graves for the old ones. It would be a lesson to them.”
Meanwhile, the captive woman had not ceased or abated her shrieking. It was a cold, cloudy day, with a bitter wind. The woman’s wild shrieking unnerved the men, the younger ones particularly. As Pea Eye watched, the woman tried to bite her own flesh, in order to pull her wrists free of their rawhide bonds. She bit herself so violen
tly that blood was soon streaming down her horse’s shoulders. Of course it did no good. Jake Spoon had tied the knots, and Jake was good with knots. It was Jake, of all the rangers, who seemed most disturbed by the woman’s screaming.
“I wish we could just shoot her, Pea,” Jake said. “If I had known she was going to bite herself and carry on like that I would have shot her to begin with.”
“I wouldn’t want to shoot no woman, not me,” Pea Eye said. He wished the sun would come out—after violent skirmishes his head was apt to throb for hours; it was throbbing at the time. He had a notion that if the sun would just come out his head might get a little better. His horse had a hard trot, which made his head pound the worse.
Jake Spoon, who was delicate and prone to vomits at the sight of dead people, couldn’t tolerate the woman’s shrieks. He plugged his ears with some cotton ticking he kept in his saddlebags for just such a purpose. Then he loped ahead, so he wouldn’t have to see the blood from the woman’s torn wrists dripping off her horse’s shoulders.
“What’s wrong with that boy?” Goodnight asked, when he saw the tufts of cotton sticking out of Jake Spoon’s ears.
“Why, I don’t know, Charlie,” Augustus said. “Maybe he’s just tired of listening to all this idle conversation.”
21.
IDAHI HAD RIDDEN all the way from the Big Wichita to the Arkansas River, looking for Blue Duck and his band of renegades; he wanted to join the band and become a renegade himself, mainly so he could go on killing white people and stealing their guns. Idahi would kill anybody, Indian or white, if they had guns that he wanted to shoot. He didn’t consider himself a harsh or a particularly bloodthirsty man—it was merely that killing people was usually the easiest way to get their guns.
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