34.
“FAMOUS SHOES don’t like these snow owls—that’s four we’ve seen now,” Augustus said. “He thinks it means the world’s coming to an end.”
“They’re just birds,” Call said, impatiently. They were in the driest country he had been in since he had been marched as a prisoner across the Jornada del Muerto many years before, a trip that Augustus also had made and survived. This time they were in pursuit of a dangerous man, and had their horses to think of. Finding water for them and their horses was what Famous Shoes ought to be thinking about—water, not the fact that a few snow owls from the north had decided to linger in Texas.
“He ought to be worried about this dry country,” Call said. “Not those birds.”
Augustus, as usual, found himself having to explain the obvious to Woodrow Call, the obvious being that a white owl meant one thing to a white man and another thing to a Kickapoo tracker.
“He might be right, though, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “Maybe the owls mean there ain’t no water out here anywhere. If we die of thirst, then the world will have come to an end, don’t you see?”
He knew Woodrow Call was a single-minded man who couldn’t think about but one problem at a time; but a glance at Pea Eye and Deets, not to mention the agitated Famous Shoes, convinced him that something had to be done to improve company morale, else they would die of worrying before they died of thirst.
Famous Shoes was indeed very upset about the white owls, because they should not be where they were. The white owls were there to bring death. Famous Shoes knew that, and did not care what the whites thought about it. He was very thirsty; so were the other men and so were the horses. That morning, though, he had seen a plover flying north, which meant that there was water somewhere near. Plovers were not birds that flew far. Also, Blue Duck and his two men were still ahead of them, their tracks as plain as rocks. For Famous Shoes, the important thing was that Blue Duck was ahead of them. Where Blue Duck could go, he could go.
Twice Famous Shoes had thought he saw Blue Duck, far ahead, but Captain McCrae, who still had his keen eyesight, insisted that he was wrong—it was only an antelope they saw.
Call and Augustus too could plainly see the tracks bearing to the northwest. The tracks didn’t deviate, either, as they would have if Blue Duck and his two companions had been casting about for water. Blue Duck either knew where he was going, or thought he did—he was gambling his life and the lives of the two men with him that water would be where he thought it was.
“Wherever he’s going, he’s been there before,” Call said, when they stopped for the night.
“Yes, he has been there before, and so has the other one,” Famous Shoes said.
“Other one—I thought you said there were two men riding with Blue Duck,” Call said. Augustus protested, confused by the statement.
“There are two men riding with Blue Duck, but there is another one, an old one,” Famous Shoes said. “He is the one they are looking for.”
“Oh Lord, that’s four against us now,” Pea Eye said. Although they were five themselves, he feared the Comanche tendency to multiply unexpectedly. If there were four against them today, there might be twenty tomorrow.
“The old one is too old to be dangerous,” Famous Shoes said. “He is riding a horse whose feet are split and whose teeth are gone. I think Blue Duck will catch him tomorrow.”
“I wish you’d told us about this other one sooner,” Call said—like Gus he was confused by the news.
Famous Shoes knew that Captain Call was as smart as any ranger, yet at times he could be stupid as a possum. The tracks of the old man and the old horse were plain to see, right by the other tracks. All of the rangers had missed what was there to see.
“Why would an old man on a poor mount be in a place like this?” Augustus asked. “That’s question number one, and question number two is, why would Blue Duck be following him? I doubt he’s rich enough to rob.”
Famous Shoes had been too preoccupied with the question of the white owls to give much thought to the questions Captain McCrae raised. The white owls had distracted him so much that he had almost forgotten about Blue Duck. But, once he stopped thinking about the owls, it was not hard to know the answers to Captain McCrae’s questions.
“The old one is looking for a good place to die,” Famous Shoes said.
“Lord, if that’s all he wants, he can stop looking,” Augustus said. “He’s found his place to die.”
“Blue Duck is following him because he wants to kill him,” Famous Shoes said. “He doesn’t want to let him die of thirst. He wants to kill him. The old man is Buffalo Hump. He twists his foot when he steps, because of the hump. I should have remembered this, but I was thinking about the owls.”
The name gave all the rangers a start. No one had mentioned Buffalo Hump to them in several years—not since the beginning of the war.
“Buffalo Hump? We thought he was dead,” Call replied, startled.
“Blue Duck is his son, I recall,” Augustus said. “He ran to his father’s camp that day he killed Jimmy Watson.”
“It was cold that day,” Pea Eye said. He didn’t remember the Indians very well, but he did remember the cold. He had supposed he would freeze that night, for want of an adequate coat.
The whites began to speculate about why Blue Duck would want to kill Buffalo Hump, but Famous Shoes didn’t listen. The young man wanted to kill the old man for all the reasons that normally drove men to kill one another. In the clear night he had just heard the song of the plover, which meant that water was near.
All night Famous Shoes sat listening. He heard the plover cry several more times, and rejoiced. Men lied often, but the plover only lied when it had eggs to protect; if the plover’s nest was near, then water, too, was near. In the morning they could drink.
35.
BLUE DUCK let Ermoke and Monkey John ride his spare horses because of the two Comanches who watched them for a day. Ermoke was the first to see them; it was shortly before his horse gave out. He pulled his rifle and pointed to the west, but Blue Duck, at first, could see nothing that he could clearly identify. Monkey John, so shortsighted that he would sometimes climb on someone else’s horse thinking it was his own, could see nothing, but he pulled his rifle just in case.
“What you see is a yucca, or two yuccas,” Blue Duck told Ermoke. He was anxious to press on and catch up with Buffalo Hump, whose track was the track of a weak old man—a man who would die within a day or two. Blue Duck did not want his father to die before they found him. He was prepared to ignore everything else in order to catch his father before he died.
It was not until they had limped into the Lake of Horses and were drinking at the little spring that Blue Duck finally saw the two Comanches. He decided that thirst had weakened his vision; sitting well to the west, in plain view, were two Comanche warriors. They were not approaching; they were merely watching, but it made Blue Duck more anxious than ever to hurry on with the chase. Then Monkey John’s horse lay down and could not rise, no matter how hard they beat him. Blue Duck knew that the Comanches must belong to the Antelope band—Quanah’s band. No other Indians would dare venture that far into the llano. They must know of the little spring—perhaps they were its guardians. If they were there, the rest of the band must not be far.
Blue Duck knew that the Antelope would not consider him a Comanche. If they decided to kill him they would come with enough warriors to kill him, which is why he decided he had better keep Ermoke and Monkey John with him, even if it meant letting them use his spare horses. Both men were reliable shots and three rifles were better than one if it came to a fight with the Antelopes.
They rested for part of a day by the spring in the Lake of Horses; the two Comanches did not approach, but neither did they leave. Blue Duck knew his father could only be a few miles ahead. In an hour or two they could catch him and dispatch him. He wanted the horses to rest and eat. They could fill up on the weeds that grew around the little spring.
He did not want to fight the Antelopes unless he had to—it was a fight he would be unlikely to win. He stayed near the spring through the night, until an hour before dawn. He meant to leave before it was light, find his father, kill him, and go north as fast as he could, to strike the Rio Carrizo or the Cimarron. If he moved quickly enough he would soon be back in the tall grass along the Cimarron; he didn’t think the Antelopes would follow him there. If necessary he would kill Ermoke and Monkey John and take the horses they rode—better to ride all the horses to death and hope to ambush a traveler on one of the westward trails than to get into a fight with the Antelopes.
In the morning, when it was light enough to scan the whole plain, Ermoke, who was very nervous, made another discovery: the rangers they thought they had outdistanced had not given up. Not only were the two Comanches still in plain sight to the west, but at least four horsemen were pursuing them from the south. Seeing this, Ermoke became bitterly annoyed with himself, for following Blue Duck to such a place. Now there were Comanches on one side and Texas Rangers behind them, in country too dry to live in; and they were there for no better reason than that Blue Duck wanted to settle a grudge with Buffalo Hump.
“We ought to have let him come by himself,” he said, to Monkey John. “Them two to the west want our hair and the goddamn rangers want to hang us.”
Monkey John was too frightened of the Comanches to worry about the rangers.
“I ain’t worried about the hanging,” he said. “There’s nothing out here they could hang us from. I’d like to keep my hair, though, if I can.
“Besides that, we’re out of tobaccy,” he added, a little later.
“That’s because you chewed it all up, you goddamn hog,” Ermoke said. In fact Monkey John, in his opinion, was little more than a human spittoon.
In the back of Monkey John’s anxious mind was another worry: Blue Duck. He had not asked them to come on the trip—if the Comanches had not showed up he would probably have left them to starve, and he still might. As they rode north Monkey John found that his worry about Blue Duck overwhelmed his other worries.
“I’m afraid Duck will kill us, once he’s done with his pa,” he said to Ermoke, who had stopped for a moment to relieve himself.
Ermoke ignored the comment. His own chief worry was Captain Call, whom he knew to be an implacable foe. He knew that Call must be one of the rangers who were following them—no one else in the ranger troop would have been likely to have pressed a pursuit so tenaciously.
Now, to his vexation, he saw that the rangers had found the dry lake and the spring in the center of it. They had all dismounted to drink and water their horses. It made it difficult to count them, but the count in itself was not too important. If Captain Call was one of the rangers it meant that they had plenty to worry about.
“I’m scared of Duck, he’s mean,” Monkey John said, a comment that amused Ermoke a good deal.
“Mean? Duck? Why, when did you notice?” he said, before he turned back north.
36.
FAMOUS SHOES had heard of the spring in the dry lake from one or two old men whose minds had been cloudy when they talked of it. He had not quite believed that it was a real place, and was grateful to the plover for calling and calling until he was able to find it. It was such a small spring that it took more than an hour for the horses to water—Captain Call forbade the men to drink until the horses had had their fill, an order Captain McCrae agreed with.
“We can drink our piss and make it another day or two, but these nags have to water,” Augustus said. Pea Eye and Deets, their tongues thick in their mouths, waited as the two horses drank.
Pea Eye was so thirsty that his head swam. He had begun to see double, too, a thing that had never occurred before in his life.
While the horses were drinking Augustus spotted the two Comanches. Famous Shoes was a few hundred yards to the west, exploring the edges of the old lake; he too saw the Comanches and came running back.
“We should leave here as soon as we can,” he said. “Those men may not like it that we have found the spring.”
Call could not see the two warriors—eyesight weaker than the norm, or at least weaker than Augustus’s, was an old vexation. He did not dispute the opinion, though. The Comanches who lived in the depths of the llano still had all their fight, as many an unfortunate traveler had found out to his doom.
“Blue Duck got here first,” Augustus commented. “If they’re feeling frisky maybe they’ll take after him.”
“Maybe—or they might take after us both,” Call said.
Famous Shoes thought that the little spring must be holy. The old people who had talked about it said it was near the place where the People had come out of the earth. Now only a few birds and the Antelope Comanche knew where it was. If the spring was holy it might not want to give its water to strangers; that might be why it flowed so slowly. He was glad when the horses and the men had finished drinking—he did not want to disturb the spring that might be holy by taking too much from it.
37.
WHEN BUFFALO HUMP AWOKE he reached for his lance, but Blue Duck had already taken it. Buffalo Hump had been deep in a dream—in his dream he had seen millions of buffalo grazing, as they had grazed on the plains in his youth. Because of the buffalo, he did not want to wake up. He wanted to dream his way into the spirit world, where Comanches rode forever. For that reason he had tried to ignore the voices that he had begun to hear in his dream.
The voices were not the voices of Comanches, and they were not ghosts. For that reason he tried to ignore them, to stay in his comfortable sleep, dreaming of buffalo.
But the voices were too loud; soon he felt the prickling in his senses that he always felt when an enemy was near, or when there was some threat from the wild. Once the prickling awakened him when a herd of buffalo were stampeding toward the place where he rested. He had had to mount quickly and ride for his life. Another time the prickling saved him from a great she-bear, angry because a hunter had killed her cub; many times it had alerted him to the approach of human enemies, some of them Indian and some of them white.
Buffalo Hump had come to the place of black rocks to die. He wanted to help his spirit slip away from his body, and, for that reason, he ignored the prickling and the voices. It was when he felt the point of his own lance touch his side that he could ignore the voices no longer.
He opened his eyes and rose to his feet, but he was stiff; he rose slowly, and, anyway, it was too late. Blue Duck had his lance. It was Blue Duck who had poked him in the ribs with his own lance: he thrust with it again, but this time Buffalo Hump blocked the lance with his buffalo skull shield, which he had kept in his lap as he slept.
The lance point hit the shield and, for a moment, stuck in the thick bone of the buffalo’s skull. Buffalo Hump held on to his shield, Blue Duck to the lance. The men with Blue Duck, one half-breed and one white, watched the brief moment of pushing and pulling silently. One of them held the short bow that Buffalo Hump had brought with him. It was plain, though, that the man could not shoot the bow. He had merely taken it so Buffalo Hump could not shoot at them with the small arrows that were only good for killing rabbits and other small game. The third man was short and misshapen, with eyes like a goat. Buffalo Hump saw that the men were comancheros or renegades of some kind, low men his son had brought with him on his errand of killing.
Finally, with a jerk that almost pulled Buffalo Hump out of the circle of black rocks, Blue Duck freed the end of the lance. He did not speak and neither did Buffalo Hump. It was obvious that Blue Duck had learned of his departure from the camp and had followed him to kill him. It was clear, too, that Blue Duck wanted to kill him badly, for he had gone to a great deal of trouble to follow him to the place of the black rocks. He and his two comancheros might have starved.
Rather than talk, Buffalo Hump took out his knife, the one weapon left to him. A knife was not much use against a lance but was all he had to fight with; and it was a knife that had pierced
the vitals of many enemies. Buffalo Hump had taken the knife off the body of a bluecoat soldier near the Rio Concho many years before.
Blue Duck was smiling—he knew it would be easy to kill an old man who had only a knife to fight with. Besides the lance, he and his men had several guns.
“I reckon you took too long a nap, old man,” Blue Duck said. He moved just outside the ring of rocks, holding the lance as if he might throw it.
Buffalo Hump saw from the awkward way Blue Duck held the lance that he had not changed. He seemed undecided as to whether to throw the lance or jab with it. Any well-trained Comanche, who knew how to use a lance, could have killed the young fool in only a few seconds. Buffalo Hump felt the scorn he had always felt at Blue Duck’s crude disregard of the old weapons. He saw that Blue Duck rode a Mexican saddle and had a buffalo gun strapped to it. But such failings didn’t matter now. His son had come to kill him and had even awakened him from his death sleep to do it. All that was left was one fight, and since his son had brought two well-armed helpers, it would not be a long fight. Buffalo Hump crouched a little and waited, hoping Blue Duck would be fool enough to grapple with him. Even though he was weak, Buffalo Hump still trusted his skill with the knife. If Blue Duck were fool enough to come near him, Buffalo Hump meant to slash at his throat. Several times he had opened an enemy’s windpipe so cleanly that the enemy would not even know he had been touched until blood blew out with the bubbles of air.
For a minute, there was a circling. Blue Duck shifted the lance from hand to hand; Buffalo Hump held his knife and his shield. Buffalo Hump knew that he could not move well. One of his legs had stiffened when he slept, and it was still stiff. All he could do was wait and hope Blue Duck made some foolish mistake. Buffalo Hump began to sing his war cry as he waited. His voice cracked as he sang, but he wanted his three enemies to know that he was still a Comanche warrior, a man who sang as he went into battle.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 121