A Vast and Desolate Land

by Robert Peecher

-22-

  Before Rab Sinclair opened his eyes he knew it was night by the cool air. He also knew he was in a tepee because of the hollow sound of the wind blowing against the stretched buffalo hide. His head pounded from back to front, and his breathing was labored by a sharp pain in his side. We was certain that while he was on the ground unconscious the Comanche must have kicked him and broken a rib or two.

  He hesitated from opening his eyes. If he was being watched, he did not want to let the Comanche know yet that he had regained consciousness.

  He tried to take a few deep breaths through his nose. He caught a faint smell of smoke, which meant that the Comanche had a fire going outside the tepee.

  He strained his ears to see if he could hear anything, trying to make his hearing work past the throbbing pain in his head. But he heard nothing in the tepee. Outside, there were faint sounds of talking.

  His wrists were bound in what felt like leather straps, and when he tried to easily pull his legs apart he felt that his ankles were also bound.

  He cracked open first one eye and then the other.

  The tepee was dark, but through barely open eyes Rab did not see anyone else in it. He was lying on a dried out buffalo hide laid directly on the ground. He was stiff and sore all over, and he did not wonder if the Comanche had kicked him more than just in the ribs. He felt thoroughly beaten.

  Nevertheless, he felt that he could stand and fight if he had to — except for the leather thongs binding his wrists and ankles.

  He needed the pain in his head to go away.

  Now he rolled his head to get a better look around the tepee. It was dark, but the open flap allowed in silver moonlight, and Rab could see that another man was bound on the ground near him. It was Skinner Jake. He appeared to be asleep or unconscious.

  Rab wondered if the others had gotten away or if they were being held in another tepee.

  He took shallow breaths to ease the stabbing pain in his ribs.

  He shut his eyes again and dozed back to sleep.

  ***

  Activity outside the tepee woke Rab. Voices. Movement. Shouts and laughter.

  Rab cracked his eyes again and saw through the flap that the sun was up, but it was still early morning. He could see people outside the tepee walking around.

  Skinner Jake was still there, still unconscious, and in the daylight Rab saw that he'd been beaten pretty good. His face was bruised and battered. His clothes were torn, and he had a nasty slash across his chest from a lance or a knife.

  The tepee was empty except for the buffalo hide on the ground. The Comanche had made certain not to leave anything that might be employed as a weapon.

  With an effort, Rab sat up.

  His ribs ached, and every movement brought a new stab of pain. His head still pounded, the sharpest of the pain emanating from the back of his skull where he'd been clubbed.

  Shouts and laughter filled the air, and Rab leaned a little bit to see what was going on outside.

  One of the Comanche warriors was picking himself up from the ground, and it looked like some of the others gathered around were mocking him over something.

  And then Rab saw what was happening as the blue roan danced into view, a Comanche astride his bare back.

  The roan bucked and reared, but the Comanche's hands dug deep into the roan's black mane.

  If he'd had a rifle, Rab Sinclair would have shot that Comanche off the roan's back.

  In addition to the men trying to ride the blue roan, Rab could also see women and children in the camp. They'd taken him back to the main body of the Comanche.

  He looked at the unconscious man on the ground.

  "I should have left you and your friend instead of taking you in," Rab said.

  "You'd be smart to lie back down and play dead," Skinner Jake said without opening his eyes or stirring any more than was necessary to whisper his response. "They think you're awake and it'll be time for them to start their games."

  Rab pulled against the leather thong binding his wrists, but it only squeezed tighter.

  Though his wrists were bound, Rab's hands and fingers were free.

  "I can pick that knot loose that has your wrists tied," Rab said. "I'll untie you and then you untie me."

  "Be quick about it," Skinner Jake said. "They've come to check on us twice since morning broke."

  Rab scooted close to Jake and began untying the leather thong. The knot was tight as the devil, and a knife would have improved his speed dramatically.

  "You been awake all night?" Rab asked.

  "Awake and waiting," Jake said. "They'll come to get us soon. Probably going to burn us and take our scalps while we're still alive. They've been known to blind a man with porcupine quills. I've heard stories of worse."

  "What about the others?" Rab asked. "Vazquez? Kuwatee? O'Toole? Caleb?"

  "Last I seen they was making tracks," Skinner Jake said. "Them Comanche knocked you a good one, and you went down. Then three or four jumped on me and beat me black and blue."

  "You think the rest of my outfit made it away?"

  "Looked that way to me," Skinner Jake said. "But I wasn't worried too much about them. I know some of the Comanche kept chasing them. I can't say if they ever caught them, though."

  "I can see my saddle," Rab said. "My rifle is still in the scabbard. If we can get to that, we can fight our way out."

  "You'll never get to it," Skinner Jake said. "We're in the main camp. There's sixty Comanche warriors out there."

  "So what do you think to do?" Rab asked.

  "I'm praying they wear theirselves out on your horse," Skinner Jake said. "They'll get sick of it sooner or later, and when they do they'll likely cut it up for their supper. But if it lasts long enough maybe we'll live to see nightfall. Then we make an escape after dark."

  "Don't seem like much of a plan," Rab said.

  "But rushing out there to try to get your hands on a rifle that's got a dozen shots in it makes sense to you?" Skinner Jake asked. "A miracle is about all we got right now."

  At last Rab felt the knot give, and he began to tug the loose end through. Working quickly now, he loosed the bands on Skinner Jake's wrists, and Jake pulled against the slack until his hands were free.

  "That's a start," he said, but he caught himself as his voice rose just slightly above a whisper.

  Skinner Jake leaned forward. It was obvious he was in pain, but he pushed through it and began untying the leather thong around his ankles.

  "Get me untied," Rab said.

  "You wait until I'm unhobbled," Skinner Jake said. "Then I'll work on your wrists."

  It took him a moment, but at last he got the thong loosened and began to pull it away from his ankles.

  "That's better," he said.

  Jake got on all fours and crawled to the opening of the tepee.

  "That horse of yours is giving them a good time of it," he said. "Just bucked another one off. They'll have him in a stew pot before early afternoon."

  Jake turned and looked back at Rab Sinclair.

  "They's going to be awful sore when they come in here and see I'm gone," Skinner Jake said. "But if you're still here it'll buy me a little time. Good luck to you."

  And then he slipped out of the opening of the tepee and disappeared from sight, leaving Rab Sinclair still bound at the wrists and ankles.

  Rab breathed a curse and tried again to pull against the leather strap on his wrists, but it only seemed to get tighter.

  With his wrists bound, he could not get to the knot on the thong around his ankles because it was tied in the back.

  Skinner Jake had left him with no way of making an escape.

  Rab leaned back on the buffalo hide on the ground, his side aching and his head throbbing.

  And then he heard shouting, and from his position he could see some of the Comanche men leaping up onto horses and racing away.

  "That's going to be Skinner Jake wishing now that he'd untied me," Rab said.

  He shut his eyes a
nd laid still, and in a moment a Comanche pulled open the front of the tepee. Rab did not move, but he knew the man stood there for a long while. When he left, he did not close the front.

  Then he heard Skinner Jake shouting. Maybe he was fighting, but it sounded like he was coming nearer.

  There was commotion outside the tepee, and Rab heard riding horses and running men. Jake shouted at the Comanche, but whatever he was saying just sounded like nonsense. The shouts were getting nearer, but even when Rab could tell they had brought him back into the camp, they did not bring him over to the tepee.

  And then, in a moment, the shouts turned to screams. Terrible screams of panic and horror filled the air.

  For several minutes Skinner Jake screamed, and then the screams went silent. Rab assumed they had killed him.

  After a few minutes, Rab heard men approaching the tepee.

  He expected that whatever fate they had for him was about to come, but instead something heavy landed on the ground next to him. A vile smell immediately hit his nostrils.

  Rab kept his eyes closed, no matter how much he wanted to look. Then someone grabbed his ankles and pulled hard against the thong, checking to make sure his ankles were still bound. The person stepped nearer and pulled against his wrists. Whoever it was then poked him several times, as if trying to determine if he was awake or would wake up.

  And then Rab heard their footsteps leaving.

  He cracked his eyes and saw no one, and then he turned his head to look at what the Comanche had thrown into the tepee.

  It was Jake. He was unconscious, passed out from the pain. A bad wound in his shoulder showed where he'd been lanced.

  But the lance point wasn't the worst of it. His boots were gone, and the bottoms of his feet were a red and bubbled mess, and the skin hung off the bottoms of his feet like melted strands.

  Rab turned away, sickened by the sight.

  They'd stuck his feet in the fire to prevent him from running away again. They had not even bothered to tie him up a second time. The burned flesh of the bottoms of his feet would keep him from running again.

  Rab chanced picking up his head to look out the open front of the tepee to where they'd been trying to ride Cromwell.

  No one was bothering him now. The horse was standing idle.

  Nearby his horse, Rab could see his saddle with its rifle.

  If he could get loose and make it to the saddle and the blue roan, Rab was certain he could get away.

  There were many voices outside, and they seemed to be in an argument. Some of the voices sounded angry, while others were raising to near shouts.

  And then in a moment, Rab could hear footsteps approaching the tepee. And then hands were on him, and he abandoned his effort to feign sleep.

  Angry, painted faces were close to his face, and they were tugging again on the leather thong on his ankles.

  And then Rab realized it wasn't the leather thong. They were pulling his boots off of his feet. And then they were lifting him, rough in the way they jerked him one way and another, pulled against his arms and legs.

  Rab Sinclair didn't need to have any more of the Comanche language than what he had to understand what was happening.

  Skinner Jake had tried to make an escape, and they'd prevented him from making another run by burning the soles off his feet.

  Now they were going to prevent Rab from trying to make an escape.

  -23-

  In the war, Fitz had seen some rough things.

  Anyone who ever wandered too near a surgeon's tent on the edge of battle lived to regret it. Limbs, arms and legs and cut off with a saw, could always be found in piles. And the men whose arms and legs were being sawed off could be heard from inside the tent. Sometimes they screamed. Sometimes they took it with manly silence.

  But those who never made it to the surgeon's tent littered every battlefield, dying slowly or quickly. Some wept at the end, realizing the vain search for glory had brought them instead to an ignoble end. Others cursed or shouted.

  When he thought of it, at least once a day, Fitz could vividly recall wounds he had seen. Gruesome and fatal wounds that stayed with him. A face torn asunder. A pool of blood forming on a friend's belly from a wound that would not be staunched. A shoulder shot away, leaving exposed bone and flesh.

  At the thought of these things, Fitz would recoil.

  He'd left the cavalry because he could not rid these things from his memory, and he hoped the horrid visions would come less frequently and with less explicit detail if he got away from men who reminded him at every turn of those whose bodies had been so terribly mangled.

  But nothing he saw or remembered from the war was as horrific as watching from a dry wash as the Comanche chased down Skinner Jake.

  Fitz was too far away to do anything, and he was on the other side of the Comanche camp.

  Riding out looking for Sinclair and the others to warn them that Skinner Jake had escaped, Fitz heard shooting.

  When he finally came up to where the shooting took place, he found only the Comanche breaking camp. From a distance he watched them. He'd seen bodies. He knew something had happened. And then he saw prisoners. From a distance he wasn't sure who the prisoners were, but when he spotted the blue roan he knew that Rab Sinclair was with the Comanche.

  And now he hunkered down in a dry wash, his piebald gelding concealed farther along where the banks of the wash kept him hid.

  All he could do was watch as the Comanche rode down on him and one, with an easy and swift movement, threw the lance into Skinner Jake's shoulder. It knocked him off his feet, and in an instant he was surrounded by Comanche. He got up to run again, yanking the lance from his own shoulder, but two then four and then more Comanche were surrounding him.

  The buffalo hunter put up a small fight, but very quickly he was overwhelmed by their numbers — and the Comanche warriors dragged him back to the ground where they kicked and punched at him. And then they carried him forcefully back to camp, and four of them held him with his arms and legs pinned, and another ripped his boots away. And they stuck his feet down into a fire.

  Skinner Jake screamed and fought, but they held him, cooking the soles of his feet.

  Fitz looked away.

  It made him sick not to do something. If his rifle could be trusted at distance, Fitz might have tried to shoot Skinner Jake just to put the man out of his misery.

  But the screams stopped when Skinner Jake passed out from the pain.

  Fitz had little opportunity to try to get closer to the camp than he was. On the open plain, the Comanche would see him the moment he left the cover of the wash. Between him and the camp, there wasn't even a rock to hide behind.

  Several of the Comanche warriors carried Skinner Jake's limp body back toward a tepee, and Fitz thought the ordeal was finished. But then he saw them come out of the tepee carrying another man, and this one was not unconscious. Fitz was stunned that the man made no desperate attempt to shake himself loose from the men toting him. Without seeing that it was Sinclair, Fitz knew it must be. Rab Sinclair had a reputation for coolness, but Fitz knew that Sinclair must have heard Skinner Jake's screams. He could not believe that Rab wasn't putting up any kind of fight.

  The small group neared the fire where they had burned Skinner Jake.

  Most everyone in the camp was watching Sinclair and the Comanche who carried him.

  Fitz tried to form a plan. All he could think to do was charge the camp, shooting with the rifle as he ran. He didn't know what he would do if he made it to Rab, but no other idea came to mind.

  Just as he stood up, a piercing whistle cut through the wind, and Fitz stood, perplexed. He was almost certain that the whistle had come from Rab Sinclair, or one of the Comanche carrying him.

  And then Fitz noticed the blue roan.

  The Comanche had left the roan untethered, like their other horses. Now the roan bucked and ran a circle in among the other horses, and then the roan charged toward the Comanche carrying Rab.
r />   Other horses among the Comanche remuda also charged, following the roan as if they, too, were trained to come to the whistle.

  By the time Cromwell was getting to the fire he was at a full gallop, and fifteen or twenty horses were following the roan.

  The horses galloped through the camp, knocking into tepees, tearing over buffalo pelts, and knocking down men who tried to grab them and get them under control. Women were running and calling out to children, but the younger children thought they'd discovered a new game and were running and laughing, trying to play with the charging horses. All the men in the camp abandoned whatever they were doing and ran to the horses, trying to get them under control.

  The men carrying Rab Sinclair dropped him on the ground and backed away as the roan reared and kicked toward them.

  As if he, too, had been trained to come at the whistle, Fitz jumped out of the wash and started running for the Comanche camp.

  -24-

  Rab Sinclair had no clear plan. He knew the roan would come with a fight, and he figured other horses would follow. Beyond creating momentary chaos in the camp, Rab didn't know what use that chaos might be, but he was ready to try anything that might delay having his feet burned to the bone.

  On the ground with horses charging back and forth around him and the blue roan kicking and rearing, Rab had to roll several times to keep clear of the horse's hooves.

  "Come on old biter!" Rab shouted at the horse.

  And then he saw what he needed. Eight yards away there were four lances leaning against each other and forming a cone. Rab rolled across the crusty ground. When he got to the lances, Rab swung his legs to knock them over. Moving quickly, while the horses still created havoc, Rab used one of the lances to cut through the leather thong binding his ankles. When his ankles were free, Sinclair got to his feet. He slid his arms over the blade of the lance and worked them up and down until the lance cut through the leather strap.

  Still the horses were causing mayhem, and none of the Comanche were paying any attention to him.

  Rab took up the lance and hurried to where he'd seen his saddle. He slid the Yellow Boy out of its scabbard and worked the lever to chamber a cartridge.