Monkey John looked awful. He had a bloody lump on his head, and a hangover. He had slept with his face in the dirt all night and an ant had stung him several times, leaving one eye swollen nearly shut. He got to his feet but he could hardly stand.
“How’s he think I can shoot?” he asked Dog Face. “I can’t see but from one eye, and it’s the wrong eye.”
“Put some mud on it, it’s just ant bites,” Dog Face said. He was cleaning his gun.
56.
AUGUSTUS WAS A LITTLE put out with himself for doing such a poor job of tracking. He had gambled on Blue Duck heading west, when in fact he had crossed the Red and gone straight north. It was the kind of gamble Call would never take. Call would have tracked all the way, or let Deets track.
The country near the Canadian was rough and broken, and he dropped south to where the plains flattened out. He wanted to spare his horse as much as possible.
He rode east all morning, a bad feeling in his heart. He had meant to catch Blue Duck within a day, but he hadn’t. The renegade had out-traveled him. It would have been rough on Lorie, such traveling. He should have borrowed Call’s mare, but the thought hadn’t occurred to him until too late. By this time Lorie could be dead, or ruined. He had helped recover several captives from the Comanches in his rangering days, and often the recovery came too late if the captives were women. Usually their minds were gone and they were only interested in dying, which they mostly did once they got back to people who would let them die.
He was thinking about Lorie when the Indians broke for him. Where they had hidden he didn’t know, for he was in the center of a level plain. He first heard a little cutting sound as bullets zipped into the grass, ten yards from his horse. Later, the sound of bullets cutting grass was more distinct in his memory than the sounds of shots. Before he really heard the shots he had his horse in a dead run, heading south. It seemed to him there were ten or twelve Indians, but he was more concerned with outrunning them than with getting a count. But within minutes he knew he wasn’t going to be able to outrun them. He had pushed his horse too hard and soon was steadily losing ground.
There was plenty of ground to lose, too. He had hoped for a creek or a bank or a gully—something he could get down into and make his stand—but he was on the flat prairie as far as the eye could see. He contemplated turning and trying to charge through them; if he killed three or four they might get discouraged. But if there was even one man among them with any sense they’d just shoot the horse, and there he’d be.
He glimpsed something white on the prairie slightly to the east and headed for it—it turned out just to be more buffalo bones, another place where a sizable herd of animals had been slaughtered. As Augustus raced through the bones he saw a wallow, a place where many buffalo had laid down and rolled in the dirt. It was only a slight depression on the plain, not more than a foot deep, but he decided it was the best he was going to get. The Indians were barely a minute behind him. He jumped down, pulled his rifle and cartridge rolls clear of the horse and dropped them in the buffalo wallow. Then he drew his knife, wrapped the bridle reins tightly around one hand, and jabbed the knife into the horse’s neck, slashing the jugular vein. Blood poured out and the horse leaped and plunged desperately but Augustus held on, though sprayed with blood. When the horse fell, he managed to turn him so that the horse lay across one end of the wallow, his blood pumping out into the dust. Once the horse tried to rise, but Augustus jerked him back and he didn’t try again.
It was a desperate trick, but the only one he could think of that increased his chances—most horses shied from the smell of fresh blood. He needed the horse for a breastworks anyway and could have shot him, but he had saved a bullet, and the blood smell might work for him.
As soon as he was sure the horse was beyond rising, he picked up his rifle. The Indians were shooting, though still far out of effective range. Again he heard the zing of bullets cutting the prairie grass. Augustus rested the rifle barrel across the dying horse’s withers and waited. The Indians were yelling as they raced down on him—one or two carried lances, but those were mainly for show, or to puncture him with if they caught him alive.
Sure enough, when they were fifty or sixty yards away, their horses caught the first whiffs of fresh blood, still pumping from the torn throat of the dying horse. They slowed and began to rear and shy, and as they did, Augustus started shooting. The Indians were dismayed; they flailed at the horses with their rifles, but the horses were spooked. Two stopped dead and Augustus immediately shot their riders. He could have asked for no better target than an Indian stopped fifty yards away on a horse that wouldn’t move. The two men dropped and lay still. Augustus replaced the two cartridges and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. The blood had bought him a chance—without it he would have been overrun and killed, no matter how fast or well he had shot. Now the Indians were trying to force their horses into a charge, but it wasn’t working—the horses kept swerving and shying. Some tried to circle to the south, and when they turned, Augustus shot two more. Then one Indian did a gallant thing—he threw a blanket over his horse’s head and got the confused horse to charge blind. The man seemed to be the leader; at least he carried the longest lance. He charged at the wallow, rifle in one hand, lance in the other, though when he tried to lever the rifle with one hand he dropped it. Augustus almost laughed, but the Indian kept up the charge with only a lance, a brave thing. Augustus shot him when he was no more than thirty feet away; he let him get that close in hopes of grabbing his horse. The Indian fell dead, but the horse shied away and Augustus didn’t feel he could afford to chase him.
The remaining Indians were discouraged. Five Indians were dead, and the battle not five minutes old. Augustus replaced his cartridges and killed a sixth as the Indians were retreating. He might have got one or two more, but decided against risking long shots when his situation was so chancy. There might be more Indians available nearby, though he considered it unlikely. Probably they had charged with all they had—in which case he had killed half of them.
With no shooting to do for a little while, Augustus took stock of the situation and decided the worst part of it was that he had no one to talk to. He had been within a minute or two of death, which could not be said to be boring, exactly—but even desperate battle was lacking in something if there was no one to discuss it with. What had made battle interesting over the years was not his opponents but his colleagues. It was fascinating, at least to him, to see how the men he had fought with most often reacted to the stimulus of attack.
Pea Eye, for example, was mostly concerned with not running out of bullets. He was extremely conservative in his choice of targets, so conservative that he often spent a whole engagement sighting at people but never pulling the trigger.
“Could have wasted a shell,” he said, if someone pointed this out to him. It was true that when he did shoot he rarely missed, but that was because he rarely shot at anything over thirty yards away.
Call was interesting to observe in a battle too. It took a fight to bring out the fighter in him, and a fighter was mostly what he was. Call was a great attacker. Once the enemy was sighted, he liked to go after them, and would often do so in defiance of the odds. He might plan elaborately before a battle, but once it was joined his one desire was to close with the enemy and destroy him. Call had destruction in him and would go on killing when there was no need. Once his blood heated, it was slow to cool. Call himself had never been beaten for good—only death could accomplish that—and he reasoned that if an enemy was alive he wasn’t beaten either—not for good.
Augustus knew that reasoning wasn’t accurate—men could get enough of fighting and turn from it. Some would do almost anything to avoid the fear it produced.
Deets understood that. He would never fire on a fleeing man, whereas Call would pursue a man fifty miles and kill him if the man had attacked him. Deets fought carefully and shrewdly—he would have known the trick about fresh blood. But Deets’s great ability was in
preventing ambushes. He would seem to feel them coming, often a day or two early, when he could have had no particular clues. “How’d you know?” they would ask him and Deets would have no answer. “Just knew,” he said.
The six remaining Indians had retreated well beyond rifle range, but they weren’t gone. He could see them holding council, but they were three hundred yards away and the heat waves created a wavery mirage between him and them.
Unless there were more Indians, Augustus didn’t consider that he was in a particularly serious situation. It was hot and the blowflies were already buzzing over the horse blood, but those were trivial discomforts. He had filled his canteen that morning, and the Canadian was no more than ten miles to the north. More than likely the Indians would decide they had missed their big chance and go away. They might try to get him at night, but he didn’t plan to be there. Come dark he would head for the river.
All afternoon the six Indians stayed where they were. Occasionally they would fire a shot his way, hoping to get lucky. Finally one rode off to the east, returning about an hour later with a white man who set up a tripod and began to shoot at him with a fifty-caliber buffalo gun.
That was an inconvenient development. Augustus had to hastily dig himself a shallow hole on the other side of the horse, where the blood and the blowflies were worse. They were not worse, though, than the impact of a fifty-caliber bullet, several of which hit the horse in the next hour. Augustus kept digging. Fortunately the man was not a particularly good shot—many of the bullets sang overhead, though one or two hit his saddle and ricocheted.
Once when the buffalo hunter was reloading, Gus took a quick shot at him, raising his barrel to compensate for the range. The shot missed the white man but wounded one of the Indian horses. The horse’s scream unnerved the shooter, who moved his tripod back another fifty yards. Augustus kept low and waited for darkness, which was only another hour away.
The shooter kept him pinned until full dark—but as soon as it was too dark to shoot, Augustus yanked his saddle loose from the dead mount and walked west, stopping to take what bullets he could salvage from the men he had killed. None had many, but one had a fairly good rifle, and Augustus took it as insurance. He hated carrying the saddle, but it was a shield of sorts; if he got caught in open country it might be the only cover he would have.
While he was going from corpse to corpse collecting ammunition, he was startled to hear the sudden rattle of shots from the east. That was puzzling. Either the Indians had fallen to fighting among themselves or someone else had come on the scene. Then the shots ceased and he heard the sound of running horses—the Indians leaving, most probably.
This new development put him in a quandary. He was prepared for a good hard walk to the river, carrying a heavy saddle, but if there were strangers around they might be friendly, and he might not have to carry the saddle. Possibly the scout for a cattle herd had stumbled into the little group of hostiles, though the main trail routes lay to the east.
At any rate, he didn’t feel he should ignore the possibility, so he turned back toward the shooting. There was still a little light in the sky, though it was dark on the ground. From time to time Augustus stopped to listen and at first heard nothing: the plains were still.
The third time he stopped, he thought he heard voices. They were faint, but they were white, an encouraging sign. He went cautiously toward them, trying to make as little noise as possible. It was hard to carry a saddle without it creaking some, but he was afraid to put it down for fear he could not find his way back to it in the dark. Then he heard a horse snort and another horse jingle his bit. He was getting close. He stopped to wait for the moon to rise. When it did, he moved a little closer, hoping to see something. Instead he heard what sounded like a subdued argument.
“We don’t know how many there is,” one voice said. “There could be five hundred Indians around here, for all we know.”
“I can go find them,” another voice said. It was a girlish voice, which surprised him.
“You hush,” the first voice said. “Just because you can catch varmints don’t mean you can sneak up on Indians.”
“I could find ’em,” the girlish voice insisted.
“They’ll find you and make soup of you if you ain’t lucky” was the reply.
“I don’t think there’s no five hundred,” a third voice said. “I don’t think there’s five hundred Indians left in this part of the country.”
“Well, if there was even a hundred, we’d have all we could do,” the first voice pointed out.
“I’d like to know who they were shooting at when we rode up,” the other man said. “I don’t believe it was buffalo, though I know it was a buffalo gun.”
Augustus decided he wouldn’t get a better opportunity than that, so he cleared his throat and spoke in the loudest tones he could muster without actually shouting.
“They were shooting at me,” he said. “I’m Captain McCrae, and I’m coming in.”
He took a few steps to the side when he said it, for he had known men to shoot from reflex when they were frightened. Nothing was more dangerous than walking into the camp of a bunch of men who had their nerves on edge.
“Don’t get nervous and shoot, I’m friendly,” he said, just as he saw the outline of their horses against the sky.
“I hate this walking around in the dark,” he added loudly—not that it was much of an observation. It was designed to keep the strangers from getting jumpy.
Then he saw four people standing by the horses. It was too dark to tell much about any of them, but he dumped the saddle on the ground and went over to shake hands.
“Howdy,” he said, and the men shook hands, though none of them had yet said anything. The surprise of his appearance had evidently left them speechless.
“Well, here we are,” Augustus said. “I’m Augustus McCrae and I’m after an outlaw named Blue Duck. Have you seen any sign of the man?”
“No, we just got here,” one of the men said.
“I know about him, though,” July said. “My name is July Johnson. I’m sheriff from Fort Smith, Arkansas, and this is my deputy, Roscoe Brown.”
“July Johnson?” Augustus asked.
“Yes,” July said.
“By God, that’s a good one,” Augustus said. “We were expecting you down in Lonesome Dove, and here you are practically in Kansas. If you’re still after Jake Spoon, you’ve missed him by about three hundred miles.”
“I have more urgent business,” July said rather solemnly.
To Augustus he seemed young, although it was hard to tell in the dark. Mainly it was his voice that seemed young.
“I see you brought family,” Augustus said. “Most lawmen don’t travel with their children. Or did you pick up these two sprats along the way?”
Nobody answered. They simply stood, as if the question was too complicated for an answer.
“Did the Indians kill your horse?” July asked.
“No, I killed him,” Augustus said. “Used him for a fort. There ain’t much to hide behind on these plains. I heard shooting. Did you kill any more of them bucks?”
“Don’t think so,” July said. “I might have hit the buffalo hunter. We never expected to find Indians.”
“I killed six this afternoon,” Augustus said. “I think there was twelve to begin with, not counting the buffalo hunter. I expect they work for Blue Duck. He stole a woman and I’m after him. I think he sent them bucks to slow me down.”
“I hope there ain’t too much of a bunch,” Roscoe said. “I never kilt one before.”
In fact he had never killed anyone before, or even given the possibility much thought. Sudden death was not unknown in Fort Smith, but it was not common, either. It had been a big shock when the Indians turned their guns on them and began to shoot at them. Not until he saw July draw his rifle and start firing did it dawn on him that they were under attack. He had hastily drawn his pistol and shot several times—it had not affected the Indians but it
angered July.
“You’re just wasting bullets, they’re way out of pistol range,” he said. But then the Indians ran, so it didn’t matter so much.
“What’s your plan, Mr. Johnson?” Augustus asked politely. “If your business is urgent you might not want to slow down long enough to help me catch this Blue Duck.”
That was true. July didn’t want to slow down at all until he found Elmira. If he had been alone, he would have traveled twenty hours a day and rested four. But he was hardly alone. Roscoe was nervous as a cat and spent all day talking about his worries. Joe didn’t complain, but the hard traveling had worn him out and he rode along in a doze most of the time and slept like a dead thing when they stopped.
The only one who didn’t suffer from the pace was Janey, who mainly walked. July had to admit that she was unusually helpful. When they stopped, she did whatever chores there were to do without being asked. And she was always up and ready to leave when he was, whereas Joe and Roscoe were so sluggish in the morning that it took them half an hour just to get their horses saddled.
Now, out of the blue, a Texas Ranger had showed up—one of the very ones who had partnered with Jake Spoon. He was afoot and a long way from help, and they couldn’t just ride off and leave him. Besides, there were hostile Indians around, which made the whole situation more worrisome.
“I haven’t planned, very much,” July said honestly. “Seems like every time I make a plan something happens to change it.”
“Well, life’s a twisting stream,” Augustus said. “Speaking of which, the Canadian River ain’t but a short way to the north. Them bucks are probably camped somewhere on it.”
“What would you advise?” July asked. “You know the country.”
“It’s a steep-banked river,” Augustus said. “If we have to fight Indians we’d be in a lot better position there than out on this plain.”
“You say the man stole a woman?” July asked.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 180