by Alan Lemay
Then, some hours beyond the posthole wells, they came to a vast sheet of rock, as flat and naked as it had been laid down when the world was made. Here the trail ended, for unshod hoofs left no mark on the barren stone. Amos remembered this reef in the plain. He believed it to be about four miles across by maybe eight or nine miles long, as nearly as he could recall. All they could do was split up and circle the whole ledge to find where the trail came off the rock.
Mart Pauley, whose horse seemed the worst beat out, was sent straight across. On the far side he was to wait, grazing within sight of the ledge, until one of the others came around to him; then both were to ride to meet the third.
Thus they separated. It was while they were apart, each rider alone with his tiring horse, that some strange thing happened to Amos, so that he became a mystery in himself throughout their last twenty-four hours together.
Brad Mathison was first to get around the rock sheet to where Mart Pauley was grazing his horse. Mart had been there many hours, yet they rode south a long way before they sighted Amos, waiting for them far out on the plain.
“Hasn’t made much distance, has he?” Brad commented.
“Maybe the rock slick stretches a far piece down this way.”
“Don’t look like it to me.”
Mart didn’t say anything more. He could see for himself that the reef ended in a couple of miles.
Amos pointed to a far-off landmark as they came up. “The trail cuts around that hump,” he said, and led the way. The trail was where Amos had said it would be, a great welter of horse prints already blurred by the wind. But no other horse had been along here since the Comanches passed long before.
“Kind of thought to see your tracks here,” Brad said.
“Didn’t come this far.”
Then where the hell had he been all this time? If it had been Lije Powers, Mart would have known he had sneaked himself a nap. “You lost a bed blanket,” Mart noticed.
“Slipped out of the strings somewhere. I sure ain’t going back for it now.” Amos was speaking too carefully. He put Mart in mind of a man half stopped in a fist fight, making out he was unhurt so his opponent wouldn’t know, and finish him.
“You feel all right?” he asked Amos.
“Sure. I feel fine.” Amos forced a smile, and this was a mistake, for he didn’t look to be smiling. He looked as if he had been kicked in the face. Mart tried to think of an excuse to lay a hand on him, to see if he had a fever; but before he could think of anything Amos took off his hat and wiped sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. That settled that. A man doesn’t sweat with the fever on him.
“You look like you et something,” Mart said.
“Don’t know what it could have been. Oh, I did come on three-four rattlesnakes.” Seemingly the thought made Amos hungry. He got out a leaf of jerky, and tore strips from it with his teeth.
“You sure you feel—”
Amos blew up, and yelled at him. “I’m all right, I tell you!” He quirted his horse, and loped out ahead.
They off-saddled in the shelter of the hump. A northering wind came up when the sun was gone; its bite reminded them that they had been riding deep into the fall of the year. They huddled against their saddles, and chewed corn meal. Brad walked across and stood over Amos. He spoke reasonably.
“Looks like you ought to tell us, Mr. Edwards.” He waited, but Amos didn’t answer him. “Something happened while you was gone from us today. Was you laid for? We didn’t hear no guns, but... Be you hiding an arrow hole from us by any chance?”
“No,” Amos said. “There wasn’t nothing like that.”
Brad went back to his saddle and sat down. Mart laid his bedroll flat, hanging on by the upwind edge, and rolled himself up in it, coming out so that his head was on the saddle.
“A man has to learn to forgive himself,” Amos said, his voice unnaturally gentle. He seemed to be talking to Brad Mathison. “Or he can’t stand to live. It so happens we be Texans. We took a reachin’ holt, way far out, past where any man has right or reason to hold on. Or if we didn’t, our folks did, so we can’t leave off, without giving up that they were fools, wasting their lives, and washed in the way they died.”
The chill striking up through Mart’s blankets made him homesick for the Edwards’ kitchen, like it was on winter nights, all warm and light, and full of good smells, like baking bread. And their people— Mart had taken them for granted, largely; just a family, people living alone together, such as you never thought about, especially, unless you got mad at them. He had never known they were dear to him until the whole thing was busted up forever. He wished Amos would shut up.
“This is a rough country,” Amos was saying. “It’s a country knows how to scour a human man right off the face of itself. A Texan is nothing but a human man way out on a limb. This year, and next year, and maybe for a hundred more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever. Someday this country will be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.”
Mart was thinking of Laurie now. He saw her in a bright warm kitchen like the Edwards’, and he thought how wonderful it would be living in the same house with Laurie, in the same bed. But he was on the empty prairie without any fire—and he had bedded himself on a sharp rock, he noticed now.
“We’ve come on a year when things go hard,” Amos talked on. “We get this tough combing over because we’re Texans. But the feeling we get that we fail, and judge wrong, and go down in guilt and shame— that’s because we be human men. So try to remember one thing. It wasn’t your fault, no matter how it looks. You got let in for this just by being born. Maybe there never is any way out of it once you’re born a human man, except straight across the coals of hell.”
Mart rolled out to move his bed. He didn’t really need that rock in his ribs all night. Brad Mathison got up, moved out of Amos’ line of sight, and beckoned Mart with his head. Mart put his saddle on his bed, so it wouldn’t blow away, and walked out a ways with Brad on the dark prairie.
“Mart,” Brad said when they were out of hearing, “the old coot is just as crazy as a bedbug fell in the rum.”
“Sure sounds so. What in all hell you think happened?”
“God knows. Maybe nothing at all. Might be he just plainly cracked. He was wandering around without rhyme or principle when we come on him today.”
“I know.”
“This puts it up to you and me,” Brad said. “You see that, don’t you? We may be closer the end than you think.”
“What you want to do?”
“My horse is standing up best. Tomorrow I’ll start before light, and scout on out far as I can reach. You come on as you can.”
“My horse got a rest today,” Mart began.
“Keep saving him. You’ll have to take forward when mine gives down.”
“All right.” Mart judged that tomorrow was going to be a hard day to live far behind on a failing pony. Like Brad, he had a feeling they were a whole lot closer to the Comanches than they had any real reason to believe.
They turned in again. Though they couldn’t know it, until they heard about it a long time after, that was the night Ed Newby came out of his delirium, raised himself for a long look at his smashed leg, then put a bullet in his brain.
Chapter Ten
By daylight Brad Mathison was an hour gone. Mart hadn’t known how Amos would take it, but there was no fuss at all. They rode on in silence, crossing chains of low hills, with dry valleys between; they were beginning to find a little timber, willow and cottonwood mostly along the dusty stream beds. They were badly in need of water again; they would have to dig for it soon. All day long the big tracks of Brad Mathison’s horse led on, on top of the many-horse trample left by the Comanche herd; but he was stirring no dust, and they could only guess how far he must be ahead.
Toward sundown Amos must have begun to worry about him, for he sent Mart on a long swing to the north, where a line of sand hills offered high ground, to
see what he could see. He failed to make out any sign of Brad; but, while he was in the hills alone, the third weird thing that could unstring him set itself in front of him again. He had a right to be nerve-raw at this point, perhaps; the vast emptiness of the plains had taken on a haunted, evilly enchanted feel since the massacre. And of course they were on strange ground now, where all things seemed faintly odd and wrong, because unfamiliar….
He had dismounted near the top of a broken swell, led his horse around it to get a distant view without showing himself against the sky. He walked around a ragged shoulder—and suddenly froze at sight of what stood on the crest beyond. It was nothing but a juniper stump; not for an instant did he mistake it for anything else. But it was in the form of similar stumps he had seen two or three times before in his life, and always with the same unexplainable effect. The twisted remains of the juniper, blackened and sand-scoured, had vaguely the shape of a man, or the withered corpse of a man; one arm seemed upraised in a writhing gesture of agony, or perhaps of warning. But nothing about it explained the awful sinking of the heart, the terrible sense of inevitable doom, that overpowered him each of the times he encountered this shape.
An Indian would have turned back, giving up what ever he was about; for he would have known the thing for a medicine tree with a powerful spirit in it, either telling him of a doom or placing a doom upon him. And Mart himself more or less believed that the thing was some kind of a sign. An evil prophecy is always fulfilled, if you put no time limit upon it; fulfilled quite readily, too, if you are a child counting little misfortunes as disasters. So Mart had the impression that this mysteriously upsetting kind of an encounter had always been followed by some dreadful, unforeseeable thing.
He regarded himself as entirely mature now, and was convinced that to be filled with cowardice by the sight of a dead tree was a silly and unworthy thing. He supposed he ought to go and uproot that desolate twist of wood, or whittle it down, and so master the thing forever. But even to move toward it was somehow impossible to him, to a degree that such a move was not even thinkable. He returned to Amos feeling shaken and sickish, unstrung as much by doubt of his own soundness as by the sense of evil prophecy itself.
The sun was setting when they saw Brad again. He came pouring off a long hill at four miles, raising a reckless dust. “I saw her!” he yelled, and hauled up sliding. “I saw Lucy!”
“How far?”
“They’re camped by a running crick—they got fires going—look, you can see the smoke!” A thin haze lay flat in the quiet air above the next line of hills.
“Ought to be the Warrior River,” Amos said. “Water in it, huh?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” Brad shouted. “I tell you I saw Lucy—I saw her walking through the camp—”
Amos’ tone was bleak. “How far off was you?”
“Not over seventy rod. I bellied up a ridge this side the river, and they was right below me!”
“Did you see Debbie?” Mart got in.
“No, but—they got a bunch of baggage; she might be asleep amongst that. I counted fifty-one Comanch’—What you unsaddling for?”
“Good a place as any,” Amos said. “Can’t risk no more dust like you just now kicked up. Come dark we’ll work south, and water a few miles below. We can take our time.”
“Timer?”
“They’re making it easy for us. Must think they turned us back at the Cat-tails, and don’t have to split up. All we got to do is foller to their village— ”
“Village? You gone out of your mind?”
“Let ’em get back to their old chiefs and their squaws. The old chiefs have gone cagy; a village of families can’t run like a war party can. For all they know—”
“Look—look—” Brad hunted desperately for words that would fetch Amos back to reality. “Lucy’s there! I saw her—can’t you hear? We got to get her out of there!”
“Brad,” Amos said, “I want to know what you saw in that camp you thought was Lucy.”
“I keep telling you I saw her walk—”
“I heard you!” Amos’ voice rose and crackled this time. “What did you see walk? Could you see her yellow hair?”
“She had a shawl on her head. But—”
“She ain’t there, Brad.”
“God damn it, I tell you, I’d know her out of a million—”
“You saw a buck in a woman’s dress,” Amos said. “They’re game to put anything on ’em. You know that.”
Brad’s sun-punished blue eyes blazed up as they had at the pothole water, and his tone went soft again. “Thee lie,” he said. “I’ve told thee afore—”
“But there’s something I ain’t told you,” Amos said. “I found Lucy yesterday. I buried her in my own saddle blanket. With my own hands, by the rock. I thought best to keep it from you long’s I could.”
The blood drained from Brad’s face, and at first he could not speak. Then he stammered, “Did they— was she—”
“Shut up!” Amos yelled at him. “Never ask me what more I seen!”
Brad stood as if knocked out for half a minute more; then he turned to his horse, stiffly, as if he didn’t trust his legs too well, and he tightened his cinch.
Amos said, “Get hold of yourself! Grab him, Mart!” Brad stepped into the saddle, and the gravel jumped from the hoofs of his horse. He leveled out down the Comanche trail again, running his horse as if he would never need it again.
“Go after him! You can handle him better than me.”
Mart Pauley had pulled his saddle, vaulted bare-back onto the sweaty withers, and in ten jumps opened up all the speed his beat-out horse had left. He gained no ground on Brad, though he used up what horse he had in trying to. He was chasing the better horse—and the better rider, too, Mart supposed. They weighed about the same, and both had been on horses before they could walk. Some small magic that could not be taught or learned, but had been born into Brad’s muscles, was what made the difference. Mart was three furlongs back as Brad sifted into the low hills.
Up the slopes Mart followed, around a knob, and onto the down slope, spurring his wheezing horse at every jump. From here he could see the last little ridge, below and beyond as Brad had described it, with the smoke of Comanche campfires plain above it. Mart’s horse went to its knees as he jumped it into a steep ravine, but he was able to drag it up.
Near the mouth of the ravine he found Brad’s horse tied to a pin-oak scrub; he passed it, and rode on into the open, full stretch. Far up the last ridge he saw Brad climbing strongly. He looked back over his shoulder, watching Mart without slowing his pace. Mart charged through a dry tributary of the Warrior and up the ridge, his horse laboring gamely as it fought the slope. Brad stopped just short of the crest, and Mart saw him tilt his canteen skyward; he drained it unhurriedly, and threw it away. He was already on his belly at the crest as Mart dropped from his horse and scrambled on all fours to his side.
“God damn it, Brad, what you doing?”
“Get the hell out of here. You ain’t wanted.”
Down below, at perhaps four hundred yards, half a hundred Comanches idled about their business. They had some piled mule packs, a lot of small fires in shallow fire holes, and parts of at least a dozen buffalo down there. The big horse herd grazed unguarded beyond. Most of the bucks were throwing chunks of meat into the fires, to be snatched out and bolted as soon as the meat blackened on the outside. No sign of pickets. The Comanches relied for safety upon their horsemanship and the great empty distances of the prairies. They didn’t seem to know what a picket was.
Mart couldn’t see any sign of Debbie. And now he heard Brad chamber a cartridge.
“You’ll get Debbie killed, you son-of-a-bitch!”
“Get out of here, I said!” Brad had his cheek on the stock; he was aiming into the Comanche camp. He took a deep breath, let it all out, and lay inert, waiting for his head to steady for the squeeze. Mart grabbed the rifle, and wrenched it out of line.
They fought f
or possession, rolling and sliding down the slope. Brad rammed a knee into Mart’s belly, twisted the rifle from his hands, and broke free. Mart came to his feet before Brad, and dived to pin him down. Brad braced himself on one hand, and with the other swung the rifle by the grip of the stock. Blood jumped from the side of Mart’s head as the barrel struck. He fell backward, end over end; then went limp, rolled slackly down the hill, and lay still where he came to rest.
Brad swore softly as he settled himself into firing position again. Then he changed his mind and trotted northward, just behind the crest of the ridge.
Mart came to slowly, without memory or any idea of where he was. Sight did not return to him at once. His hands groped, and found the rocky ground on which he lay; and next he recognized a per sis tent rattle of gunfire and the high snarling of Comanche war cries, seemingly some distance away. His hands went to his head, and he felt clotting blood. He reckoned he had got shot in the head, and was blind, and panic took him. He struggled up, floundered a few yards without any sense of balance, and fell into a dry wash. The fall knocked the wind out of him, and when he had got his breath back his mind had cleared enough so that he lay still.
Some part of his sight was coming back by the time he heard a soft footstep upon sand. He could see a shadowy shape above him, swimming in a general blur. He played possum, staring straight up with unwinking eyes, waiting to lose his scalp.
“Can you hear me, Mart?” Amos said.
He knew Amos dropped to his knees beside him. “I got a bullet in my brain,” Mart said. “I’m blind.”
Amos struck a match and passed it before one eye and then the other. Mart blinked and rolled his head to the side. “You’re all right,” Amos said. “Hit your head, that’s all. Lie still till I get back!” He left, running.