Dead Man's Walk

by Larry McMurtry

  But where the Comanches were, no one knew. The Indians could be drawing a circle around them, even as they walked. If they fired the grass again, there would be no canyon to hide them. They had no horses, and even horses had not been able to outrun the fire.

  "What if they set another fire, Woodrow?" Gus asked. "We'd be fried like that jackrabbit you're carrying." Call walked on. What Gus had just said was obviously true. If the Indians fired the grass again they would all be killed. That was such a plain fact that he didn't see any need to talk about it. Gus would do better to be thinking about grub, or water-holes, it seemed to him.

  "Don't it even worry you?" Gus asked.

  "You think too much," Call said. "You think about the wrong things, too. I thought you wanted to be a Ranger, until you met that girl. Now I guess you'd rather be in the dry goods business." Gus was irritated by his friend's curious way of thinking.

  "I wasn't thinking about no girl," he informed Call. "I was thinking about being burned up." "Rangering means you can die any day," Call pointed out. "If you don't want to risk it, you ought to quit." Just as he said it an antelope bounded up out of the tall grass, right in front of them. Gus had been carrying his rifle over one shoulder, barrel forward, stock back. By the time he got his gun to his shoulder, the antelope was an astonishing distance away. Gus shot, but the antelope kept running. Call raised his gun, only to find that Gus was right between him and the fleeing animal. By the time he stepped to the side and took aim the antelope was so far away that he didn't shoot. Shadrach, who had seen the whole thing, was annoyed.

  "You didn't need to shoot it, you could have hit it over the head with your gun," he said.

  "Well, it moved quick," Gus said, lamely.

  Who would expect an antelope to move slow?

  The whole troop was looking at him, as if it was entirely his fault that a tasty beast had escaped.

  The incident brought Bigfoot to life, though-- and Shadrach, too. The old man had entrusted his rifle to Matilda, but he got it back.

  "That little buck was just half grown," Bigfoot said. "I doubt it will run more than a mile.

  Maybe if we ease along we can kill it yet." "Maybe," Shadrach said. "Let's go." The two scouts left together--Caleb Cobb had been walking so far ahead that he was unaware of the incident until he decided it was time to make a dry camp for the night. He had heard the shot and supposed someone had surprised some game.

  When he got back and discovered that both his scouts were gone in pursuit of an antelope, he was not pleased.

  "Both of them went, after one little buck?" he asked. "Now, that was foolish, particularly when we got all this good horse meat to nibble on." Night fell and deepened, the sunset dying slowly along the wide western horizon.

  Matilda Roberts was pacing nervously. She blamed herself for not having tried harder to discourage Shadrach from going after the antelope. Bigfoot was younger--he could have tracked the antelope alone.

  By midnight the whole camp had given up on the scouts. Matilda could not stop sobbing.

  Memory of Indians was on everybody's mind.

  The two men could be enduring fierce tortures even then. Gus thought of the missed shot, time after time. If he only hadn't had his rifle over his shoulder, he could have hit the antelope. But all his remembering didn't help. The antelope was gone, and so were the scouts.

  "Maybe they just camped and went to sleep," Long Bill suggested. "It's hard enough to find your way on this dern plain in the daylight. How could anyone do it at night?" "Shadrach ain't never been lost, night or day," Matilda said. "He can find his way anywhere. He'd be here, if he wasn't dead." Then she broke down again.

  "He's dead--he's dead, I know it," she said. "That goddamn hump man got him." "If he wasn't dead, I'd shoot him, or Wallace one," Caleb said. "I lost my dog and both my scouts in the same day. Why it would take two scouts to track one antelope buck is a conundrum." "Say that again--a what?" Long Bill asked.

  Brognoli sat beside him, his head still jerking, his look still glassy eyed. In the moments when his head stopped jerking, it was twisted at an odd angle on his neck.

  "A conundrum," Caleb repeated. "I visited Harvard College once and happened to learn the word." "What does it mean, sir?" Call asked.

  "I believe it's Latin," Gus said. One of his sisters had given him a Latin lesson, in the afternoon once, and he was anxious to impress Caleb Cobb with his mental powers--perhaps he'd make sergeant yet.

  "Oh, are you a scholar, Mr. McCrae?" Caleb asked.

  "No, but I still believe it's Latin--I've had lessons," Gus said. The lessons part was a lie. After one lesson of thirty minutes duration he had given up the Latin language forever.

  "Well, I heard it in Boston, and Boston ain't very Latin," Caleb said. "Conundrum is a thing you can't figure out. What I can't figure out is why two scouts would go after one antelope." "Two's better than one, out here," Long Bill said. "I wouldn't want to go walking off without somebody with me who knew the way back." "If Shad ain't dead, he's left," Matilda said. "He was talking about leaving anyway." "Left to do what?" Caleb asked. "We're on the Staked Plains. All there is to do is wander." "Left, just left," Matilda said. "I guess he didn't want to take me with him." Then Matilda broke down. She sobbed deeply for awhile, and then her sobs turned to howls. Her whole body shook and she howled and howled, as if she were trying to howl up her guts.

  In the emptiness of the prairies the howls seemed to hover in the air. They made the men uneasy--it was as if a great she-wolf were howling, only the she-wolf was in their midst. No one could understand it.

  Shadrach had gone off to kill an antelope buck, and Matilda was howling--a woman abandoned.

  Many of the men shifted a little, wishing the woman would just be quiet. She was a whore. No one had asked her to form an attachment to old Shadrach anyway. He was a mountain man--mountain men were born to wander.

  Several men had been hoping Matilda would become a whore again--they had a long walk ahead, and a little coupling would at least be a diversion. But hearing her howl, the same men, Long Bill among them, began to have second thoughts. The woman was howling like a beast, and a frightening beast at that. Coupling with her would be risky. Besides, old Shadrach might not be gone.

  He might return at an inconvenient time and take offense.

  Caleb Cobb was unaffected by Matilda's howling. He was eating a piece of horse meat-- he glanced at Matilda from time to time. It amused him that the troop had become so uneasy, just because a woman was crying. Love, with all its mystery, had arrived in their midst, and they didn't like it. A whore had fallen in love with an old man of the mountains. It wasn't supposed to happen, but it had. The men were unnerved by it--such a thing was unnecessary, even unnatural. Even the Comanches, in a way, worried them less.

  Comanches did what they were expected to, which was kill whites. It might mean war to the death, but at least there was no uncertainty about what to expect. But here was a woman howling like a she-wolf--what sense did that make?

  "Love's a terrible price to pay for company, ain't it, Matty?" Caleb said. "I won't pay it, myself. I'd rather do without the company." One by one, the exhausted men fell asleep.

  Gus wanted to play cards; there was rarely a night when the urge for cardplaying didn't come over him. But the men ignored him. They didn't want to play cards when they had nothing to play for, and were thirsty anyway. It was pointless to play cards when Buffalo Hump and his warriors might be about to hurl down on them, and Johnny Carthage said as much.

  "Well, they ain't here now, why can't we play a few hands?" Gus asked, annoyed that his friends were such sleepyheads.

  The men didn't even answer. They just ignored him. For awhile, once Matty's howls subsided, the only sound in camp was the sound of shuffling cards--Gus shuffled and shuffled the deck, to keep his hands busy.

  Call took the guard--he went away from camp a little ways to stand it. He preferred to be apart at night, to think over the day's action--if there was actio
n. It might be that he would command a troop someday. He wanted to learn; and yet he had no teachers. He was on his second expedition as a Ranger and nothing on either expedition had been well planned. In all their encounters with the Indians, the Indians had outplanned them and outfought them, by such a margin that it was partly luck that any of them survived.

  Call couldn't understand it. Caleb Cobb had spoken of Harvard College, and Major Chevallie had been at West Point--Call knew little about Harvard College, but he did know that West Point was where generals and colonels were trained. If these men had such good schooling, why didn't they plan better? It was worrisome.

  Now they were out in the middle of a big plain, and no one seemed to know much about where they were going or how to survive until they got there. No one knew how to find water reliably, or what plants they could eat, if they had to eat plants. It was fine to rely on game, if there was game, but what if there wasn't? Even old Jesus, the Mexican blacksmith in San Antonio, knew more about plants than any one of the Rangers--though maybe not more than Sam had known.

  It was obviously wrong to allow only one or two men in a troop to be keepers of all the knowledge that the troop needed for survival. Sam had known how to doctor, but he had fallen over a cliff and no one had bothered to get instructions from him about how to treat various wounds. Call had been made a little uneasy by Matilda's howling, but he was not as affected by it as most of the other men. Probably she would stop crying when she wore out; probably she would get up and be herself again, the next day.

  Call liked Matilda: she had been helpful to him on more than one occasion. The fact that she had fastened on Shadrach to love was a matter beyond his scope. People could love whom they pleased, he supposed. That was excusable--what wasn't excusable, in his view, was setting off on a long, dangerous expedition without adequate preparation. He resolved that if he ever got to lead Rangers, he would see that each man under his command received clear training and sound instruction, so they would have a chance to survive, if the commander was lost.

  Call enjoyed his guard time. Now that there were no horses to steal, the Indians would not need to come around, unless it was to murder them. He could see no reason for them to risk a direct attack. The Rangers had no water and little food. It was hundreds of miles to where they were going, and no one knew the way. The Comanches didn't need to put themselves at risk, just to destroy the Rangers; the country would do the job for them.

  He liked sitting apart from the camp, listening to the night sounds from the prairie. Coyotes howled, and other coyotes answered them.

  Occasionally, he would hear the scratchings of small animals. Hunting birds, hawks or owls, passed overhead. Sometimes Call wished that he could be an Indian for a few days, or at least find a friendly Indian who could train him in their skills. The Comanches, on two nights, had stolen thirty horses from a well-guarded place. He would have liked to go along with the horse thieves on such a raid, to see how they did it.

  He wanted to know how they could creep into a horse herd without disturbing it. He wanted to know how they could take the horses out without being seen, or heard.

  He knew, though, that no Indian was likely to come along and offer to instruct him; he would just have to watch and learn. It annoyed him that Gus McCrae had so little interest in the skills needed for rangering. All Gus thought of was whores, cards, and the girl in the general store in Austin.

  If Gus had been carrying his rifle correctly, he could have killed the buck antelope and the troop would not have lost its scouts.

  Just before dawn, with the night peaceful, Call relaxed and dozed for a minute. Though it seemed only minutes that he dozed, his awakening was rude. Someone yanked his head back by the hair, and drew a finger across his throat.

  "They say you don't feel the knife that cuts your throat," Bigfoot said. "If I had been a Comanche, you'd be dead." Call was badly embarrassed. He had been caught asleep. It was only just beginning to be light. He saw Shadrach, a little distance behind Bigfoot. The old man was leading three horses.

  "Yep, we found three nags," Bigfoot said. "I guess they were lucky and found a thin patch of fire." "We thought you were dead," Call told them.

  "Matty was upset about Shad." "Shad's fine--he wants to go look for more horses," Bigfoot said. "Three nags won't carry this troop to New Mexico." Caleb Cobb gave the returning scouts a stony welcome. A rattlesnake had crawled across him during the night and disturbed his sleep.

  His temper was foul, and he didn't bother to conceal the fact.

  "Nobody told you to go chasing antelope," he said. "But since you went, where's the meat? If I still had chains I'd put them on you." The carcass of the little antelope was slung across one of the recaptured horses. Shadrach pulled it off, and pitched it at Caleb's feet. He was angry, but Bigfoot Wallace was angrier.

  Few of the men had seen Bigfoot's temper rise, but those who had knew to lean far back from it. His face had grown red and his eyes menacing, as he stood before Caleb Cobb.

  "You wouldn't put no damn chains on me, I guess," he said. "I won't be chained--not by you and not by any man.

  "You ain't no colonel!" he added.

  "You're nothing but a land pirate. They run you off the seas, so now you're out here trying to pirate Santa Fe. I've took my last orders from you, Mr. Cobb, and Shadrach feels the same." Caleb calmly stood up and drew his big knife. "Let's fight," he said. "We'll see how hard you are to chain once I cut your goddamn throat." In an instant, Bigfoot's knife was out; he was ready to start slashing at Caleb Cobb, but before the fight started old Shadrach slipped between them. He grabbed two pistols from Gus, and pointed one at each combatant.

  "No cutting," he said. The pistols were pointed at each man's chest. Shadrach's action was so unexpected that it chilled the fury in Caleb and Bigfoot.

  "You goddamn fools!" Shadrach said. "We need every man we can get--I'll do the killing, if there's killing to be done." Caleb and Bigfoot lowered their knives-- both looked a little sheepish, but the menace was not entirely gone.

  "We best save up to fight the Comanches," Shadrach said, handing Gus back his guns.

  "All right," Caleb said. "But I don't tolerate mutiny. I still give the orders, Wallace." "Give better ones, then," Bigfoot said.

  "I wouldn't waste a fart on your damn orders." Most of the Rangers were black to the waist, from tramping through five miles of sooty grass.

  They had used up all the water in their canteens and were already feeling thirsty, although it was early morning and still cool. Bigfoot and Shadrach had seen no water while tracking the antelope.

  Old Shadrach's beard had red smudges on it. He had cut the little antelope's throat and drunk some of its blood.

  "I wonder who gets to ride the horses?" Gus asked. "I guess we ought to let Johnny ride one--he's so gimpy he can't keep up." Indeed, the walk across the hot grass had been an ordeal for Johnny Carthage. In the course of the march he had fallen almost an hour behind the troop. He knew that he would have been easy prey for a Comanche. He struggled so, to keep up, that he exhausted himself and simply lay down and went sound asleep once he finally struggled to the outskirts of camp. Call had heard his wheezy snores as he stood guard.

  "There's probably more horses that didn't get scorched," Gus said.

  Call didn't answer. One or two more horses would not solve their problems. The sun had come up, lighting the plain far to the west and north.

  On the farthest edge little white clouds lined the horizon. The plain was absolutely empty.

  Call saw no animals, no birds, no trees, no river courses, no Indians-- nothing.

  "Who do you think would have won, if Caleb and Bigfoot had fought?" Gus asked.

  "Shadrach would have won," Call said. "He would have killed them both." "That wasn't what I meant," Gus said, but Call had turned away. Long Bill was cooking the antelope, and the meat smelled good.

  He wanted a slice, before the meat was all gone.

  One little antelope wouldn't go
far, not with so many hungry men.

  "Carry your gun right today," Call told Gus, when the march started. "We might see another antelope, and we can't afford another miss." "I won't miss, next time," Gus said.

  The next day they found four more horses. Two had serious burns, but two were healthy. Caleb killed the two burned horses, and dried their meat. In the afternoon they found a tiny, muddy depression on the plain, with a little scummy water in it. The depression was full of frogs and tadpoles--though the water was greenish, the Rangers drank it anyway. Some of the men immediately vomited it back up. They were thirsty, and yet could not keep the water down.

  The next morning, Caleb decided to divide the troop.

  "Corporal Call and Corporal McCrae can go with you, Wallace," Caleb said. "Take three horses and try to reach the settlements. Ride night and day, but rest your mounts every three hours. Look for a village called Anton Chico. You ought to strike it first." "Who gets the other horses?" Long Bill asked.