The Searchers

by Alan Lemay

  “A young buck fetched it in. Filched it, naturally. He said it belonged off a young’n—”

  “Is she aliver?”

  “He claimed so. Said she was catched by Chief Scar the tail end of last summer.”

  “Take care, Jerem! I never heard of no Chief Scar!”

  “Me neither.” Futterman shrugged. “He’s supposed to be a war chief with the Nawyecky Comanches.”

  “War chief,” Amos repeated with disgust. Among the Comanches any warrior with a good string of coups was called a war chief.

  “You want me to shut up, say so,” Futterman said testily. “Don’t be standing there giving me the lie every minute!”

  “Keep talking,” Amos said, relaxing a little.

  “Scar was heading north. He was supposed to cross the Red, and winter-in at Fort Sill. According to this buck. Maybe he lied.”

  “And maybe you lie,” Amos said.

  “In that case, you won’t find her, will you? And I won’t get the thousand.”

  “You sure as hell won’t,” Amos agreed. He stuffed Debbie’s dress into the pocket of his sheepskin.

  “Stay the night, if you want. You can have your pick of them squaws.”

  The squaws sat stolidly with lowered eyes. Mart saw that a couple of them, with the light color of mixed blood, were as pretty as any he had seen. Amos ignored the offer, however. He bought a skimpy mule load of corn for another twenty dollars, with only a token argument over the outrageous price.

  “I expect you back when you find her,” Futterman reminded him, “to pay the money into this here hand.” He showed the dirty hand he meant.

  “I’ll be back if I find her,” Amos said. “And if I don’t.”

  Little daylight was left as they struck northward along Lost Mule Creek. The overcast broke, and a full moon rose, huge and red at first, dwindling and paling as it climbed. And within two hours they knew that the lonely prairie was not half lonely enough, from the standpoint of any safety in this night. Mart’s stud horse told them first. He began to prick his ears and show interest in something unseen and unheard, off on their flank beyond the Lost Mule. When he set himself to whinny they knew there were horses over there. Mart picked him up sharply, taking up short on the curb, so the uproar the stud was planning on never come out. But the horse fussed and fretted from then on.

  Though the stud could be stopped from hollering, their pack mule could not. A little farther on he upped his tail, lifted his head, and whipsawed the night with a bray fit to rouse the world.

  “That fool leatherhead is waking up people in Kansas,” Mart said. “You want I should tie down his tail? I heard they can’t yell at all, failin’ they get their tail up.”

  Amos had never seen it tried, but he figured he could throw off on that one by percentage alone. “That’s what I like about you,” he said. “Man can tell you any fur-fetched thing comes in his head, and you’ll cleave to it for solemn fact from then on.

  “Well, then—why don’t we split his pack, and stick a prickle pear under his tail, and fog him loose?”

  “He’d foller anyway.”

  “We can tie him. Shoot him even. This here’s the same as traveling with a brass band.”

  Amos looked at him with disbelief. “Give up a fifteen-dollar mule for the likes of Jerem? I guess you don’t know me very well. Leave the brute sing.”

  The thing was that nothing answered the mule from beyond the creek. The stud might have scented a band of mustangs, but mustangs will answer a mule same as a horse. Their animals were trying to call to ridden horses, probably Spanish curbed.

  “I see no least reason,” Mart said, “why they can’t gallop ahead and dry-gulch us any time they want to try.”

  “How do you know they haven’t tried?”

  “Because we ain’t been fired on. They could pick any time or place they want.”

  “I ain’t led you any kind of place they want. Why you think I swung so far out back there a few miles? That’s our big advantage—they got to use a place I pick.”

  They rode on and on, while the moon shrunk to a pale dime, and crossed the zenith. The mule lost interest, but the stud still fretted, and tried to trumpet. The unseen, unheard stalkers who dogged them were still there.

  “This can’t run on forever,” Mart said.

  “Can’t it?”

  “We got to lose ’em or outrun ’em. Or—”

  “What for? So’s they can come on us some far place, when we least expect?”

  “I can’t see ’em giving up,” Mart argued. “If this kind of haunting has to go on for days and weeks—”

  “I mean to end it tonight,” Amos said.

  They off-saddled at last in the rough ground from which the Lost Mule rose. Amos picked a dry gully, and they built a big tenderfoot fire on a patch of dry sand. Mart did what Amos told him up to here.

  “I figure I got a right to know what you aim to do,” he said at last.

  “Well, we might make up a couple of dummies out o’—”

  Mart rebelled. “If I heard one story about a feller stuffed grass in his blanket and crawled off in the buck brush, I heard a million! Come morning, the blanket is always stuck full of arrows. Dozens of ’em. Never just one arrow, like a thrifty Indian would make do. Now, you know how hard arrows is to make!”

  “Ain’t studyin’ on Indians.”

  “No, I guess not. I guess it must be crazy people.”

  “In poker, in war,” Amos said, “what you want is a simple, stupid plan. Reason you hear about the old flim-flams so much is they always work. Never try no deep, tricky plan. The other feller can’t foller it; it throws him back on his common sense—which is the last thing you want.”

  “But this here is childish!”

  Amos declared that what you plan out never helps much any; more liable to work against you than anything else. What the other fellow had in mind was the thing you wanted to figure on. It was the way you used his plan that decided which of you got added to the list of the late lamented. But he said no more of dummies. “You hungry? I believe they’ll stand off and wait for us to settle down. We got time to eat, if you want to cook.”

  “I don’t care if I never eat. Not with what’s out there in the dark.”

  Only precaution they took was to withdraw from the ember-lighted gully, and take cover under a low-hung spruce on the bank. About the first place a killer would look, Mart thought, once he found their camp. Mart rolled up in his blankets, leaving Amos sitting against the stem of the spruce, his rifle in his hands.

  “You see, Martie,” Amos went back to it, “a man is very liable to see what he’s come expecting to see. Almost always, he’ll picture it all out in his mind beforehand. So you need give him but very little help, and he’ll swindle hisself. Like one time in the Rangers, Cap Harker offered five hundred dollars reward for a feller—”

  “Now who ever give the Rangers five hundred dollars? Not the Texas legislature, I guarandamtee.”

  “—for taking a feller alive, name of Morton C. Pettigrew. Cap got the description printed up on a handbill. Middling size; average weight; hair-colored hair, eye-colored eyes—”

  “Now wait a minute!”

  “Shut up. Temperment sociable and stand-offish; quiet, peaceable, and always making trouble.”

  “Never see such a damn man.”

  “Well, you know, that thing got us more than forty wanted men? Near every settlement in Texas slung some stranger in the calabozo and nailed up the door. We gathered in every size and shape, without paying a cent. A little short red-head Irishman, and a walking skeleton a head taller’n me, and a Chinaman, and any number of renegade Mex. Near every one of ’em worth hanging for something, too, except the Chinaman; we had to leave him go. Cap Harker was strutting up and down Texas, singing ‘Bringing home the sheaves,’ and speaking of running for governor. But it finished him.”

  “How?”

  “Marshal down at Castlerock grobe a feller said he was Morton C. Pett
igrew. We sent a man all the way back to Rhode Island, trying to break his story. But it was his right name, sure enough. Finally we had to make up the reward out of our own pants.”

  Mart asked nervously, “You think they’ll try guns, or knives?”

  “What? Who? Oh. My guess would be knives. But you let them make the choice. We’ll handle whichever, when it comes. Go’n to sleep. I got hold of everything.”

  All they really knew was that it would come. No doubt of that now. The stud was trumpeting again, and stammering with his feet. Mart was not happy with the probability of the knives. Most Americans would rather be blown to bits than face up to the stab and slice of whetted steel—nobody seems to know just why. Mart was no different. Sleep, the man says. Fine chance, knowing your next act must be to kill a man, or get a blade in the gizzard. And he knew Amos was a whole lot more strung-up than he was willing to let on. Amos hadn’t talked so much in a month of Sundays.

  Mart settled himself as comfortably as he could for the sleepless wait that was ahead; and was asleep in the next half minute.

  The blast of a rifle wakened him to the most confusing ten minutes of his life. The sound had not been the bang that makes your ears ring when a shot is fired beside you, but the explosive howl, like a snarl, that you hear when it is fired toward you from a little distance off. He was rolling to shift his probably spotted position when the second shot sounded. Somebody coughed as the bullet hit, made a brief strangling noise, and was quiet. Amos was not under the spruce; Mart’s first thought was that he had heard him killed.

  Down in the gully the embers of their fire still glowed. Nothing was going on down there at all; the action had been behind the spruce on the uphill side. He wormed on his belly to the place where he had heard the man hit. Two bodies were there, instead of one, the nearer within twenty feet of the spot where he had slept. Neither dead man was Amos. And now Mart could hear the hoof-drum of a running horse.

  From a little ridge a hundred feet away a rifle now spoke twice. The second flash marked for him the spot where a man stood straight up, firing deliberately down their back trail. Mart leveled his rifle, but in the moment he took to make sure of his sights in the bad light, the figure disappeared. The sound of the running horse faded out, and the night was quiet.

  Mart took cover and waited; he waited a long time before he heard a soft footfall near him. As his rifle swung, Amos’ voice said, “Hold it, Mart. Shootin’s over.”

  “What in all hell is happening here?”

  “Futterman held back. He sent these two creeping in. They was an easy shot from where I was. Futterman, though—it took an awful lucky hunk of lead to catch up with that one. He was leaving like a scalded goat.”

  “What the devil was you doing out there?”

  “Walked out to see if he had my forty dollars on him.” It wasn’t the explanation Mart was after, and Amos knew it. “Got the gold pieces all right. Still in his pants. I don’t know what become of my four bits.”

  “But how come—how did you make out to nail ’em?”

  What can you say to a man so sure of himself, so belittling of chance, that he uses you for bait? Mart could have told him something. There had been a moment when he had held Amos clean in his sights, without knowing him. One more pulsebeat of pressure on the hair-set trigger, and Amos would have got his head blown off for his smartness. But he let it go.

  “We got through it, anyway,” Amos said.

  “I ain’t so sure we’re through it. A thing like this can make trouble for a long, long time.”

  Amos did not answer that.

  As they rode on, a heavy cloud blank came over the face of the lowering moon. Within the hour, snow began to fall, coming down in flakes so big they must have hissed in the last embers of the fire they had left behind. Sunrise would find only three low white mounds back there, scarcely recognizable for what they were under the blanketing snow.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Winter was breaking up into slush and sleet, with the usual freezing setbacks, as they reached Fort Sill again. The Indians would begin to scatter as soon as the first pony grass turned green, but for the present there were many more here than had come in with the early snows. Apparently the Wild Tribes who had taken the Quaker Peace Policy humorously at first were fast learning to take advantage of it. Three hundred lodges of Wichitas in their grass beehive houses, four hundred of Comanches in hide tepees, and more Kiowas than both together, were strung out for miles up Cache Creek and down the Medicine Bluff, well past the mouth of Wolf Creek.

  Nothing had been seen of the Queherenna, or Antelope Comanches, Under Bull Bear, Black Horse, and Wolf-Lying-Down, or the Kotsetaka (Buffalo-followers) under Shaking Hand, all of whom stayed in or close to the Staked Plains. The famous war chief Tabananica, whose name was variously translated as Sound-of-Morning, Hears-the-Sunrise, and Talks-with-Dawn-Spirits, was not seen, but he was heard from: He sent word to the fort urging the soldiers to come out and fight. Still, those in charge were not heard to complain that they hadn’t accumulated Indians enough. A far-sighted chief named Kicking Bird was holding the Kiowas fairly well in check, and the Wichitas were quiet, as if suspicious of their luck; but the Comanches gleefully repaid the kindness of the Friends with arrogance, insult, and disorderly mischief.

  Mart and Amos were unlikely to forget Agent Hiram Appleby. This Quaker, a graying man in his fifties, looked like a small-town storekeeper, and talked like one, with never a “thee” nor “thou”; a quiet, unimpressive man, with mild short-sighted eyes, stains on his crumpled black suit, and the patience of the eternal rocks. He had watched the Comanches kill his milch cows, and barbecue them in his dooryard. They had stolen all his red flannel underwear off the line, and paraded it before him as the outer uniform of an improvised society of young bucks. And none of this changed his attitude toward them by the width of a whistle.

  Once they watched a Comanche buck put a knife point to Appleby’s throat in a demand for free ammunition, and spit in the Agent’s face when it didn’t work. Appleby simply stood there, mild, fusty looking, and immovable, showing no sign of affront. Amos stared in disbelief, and his gun whipped out.

  “If you harm this Indian,” Appleby said, “you will be seized and tried for murder, just as soon as the proper authorities can be reached.” Amos put away his gun. The Comanche spat in an open coffee bin, and walked out. “Have to make a cover for that,” Appleby said.

  They would never understand this man, but they could not disbelieve him, either. He did all he could, questioning hundreds of Indians in more than one tribal tongue, to find out what Mart and Amos wanted to know. They were around the Agency through what was left of the winter, while Comanches, Kiowas, and Kiowa Apaches came and went. When at last Appleby told them that he thought Chief Scar had been on the Washita, but had slipped away, they did not doubt him.

  “Used to be twelve main bands of Comanches, in place of only nine, like now,” Appleby said, with the customary divergence from everything they had been told before. “Scar seems to run with the Wolf Brothers; a Comanche peace chief, name of Bluebonnet, heads them up.”

  They knew by now what a peace chief was. Among Comanches, some old man in each family group was boss of his descendants and relatives, and was a peace chief because he decided things like when to move and where to camp—anything that did not concern war. When a number of families traveled together, their peace chiefs made up the council—which meant they talked things over, sometimes. There was always one of the lot that the others came to look up to, and follow more or less— kind of tacitly, never by formal election—and this one was the peace chief. A war chief was just any warrior of any age who could plan a raid and get others to follow him. Comanche government was weak, loose, and informal; their ideas of acceptable behavior were enforced almost entirely by pop u lar opinion among their kind.

  “Putting two and two together, and getting five,” Appleby told them, “I get the idea Blue-bonnet kind of tags along with different
bunches of Nawyeckies. Sometimes one bunch of ’em, sometimes another. Too bad. Ain’t any kind of Comanche moves around so shifty as the Nawyecky. One of the names the other Comanches has for ’em means Them As Never Gets Where They’re Going.’ Don’t you believe it. What it is, they like to lie about where they’re going, and start that way, then double back, and fork off. As a habit; no reason needed. I wouldn’t look for ’em in Indian Territory, was I you; nor anyplace else they should rightfully be. I’d look in Texas. I kind of get the notion, more from what ain’t said than what they tell me, they wintered in the Pease River breaks. So no use to look there—they’ll move out, with the thaw. I believe I’d look up around the different headwaters of the Brazos, if I was doing it.”

  “You’re talking about a hundred-mile spread, cutting crosswise—you know that, don’t you? Comes to tracing out all them branches, nobody’s going to do that in any one year!”

  “I know. Kind of unencouraging, ain’t it? But what’s a man to say? Why don’t you take a quick look at twenty-thirty miles of the Upper Salt? I know you just been there, or nigh to it, but that was months ago. Poke around in Canyon Blanco a little. Then cut across and try the Double Mountain Fork. And Yellow House Crick after, so long as you’re up there. If you don’t come on some kind of Nawyeckies, some place around, I’ll put in with you!”

  He was talking about the most remote, troublesome country in the length of Texas, from the standpoint of trying to find an Indian.

  Amos bought two more mules and a small stock of trade goods, which Appleby helped them to select. They took a couple of bolts of cotton cloth, one bright red and one bright blue, a lot of fancy buttons, spools of ribbon, and junk like that. No knives, because the quality of cheap ones is too easily detected, and no axe heads because of the weight. Appleby encouraged them to take half a gross of surplus stock-show ribbons that somebody had got stuck with, and shipped out to him. These were flamboyant sateen rosettes, as big as your hand, with flowing blue, red, or white ribbons. The gold lettering on the ribbons mostly identified winners in various classes of hogs. They were pretty sure the Indians would prize these highly, and wear them on their war bonnets. No notions of comedy or fraud occurred either to Appleby or the greenhorn traders in connection with the hog prizes. A newcomer might think it funny to see a grim-faced war chief wearing a First Award ribbon, Lard-Type Boar, at the temple of his headdress. But those who lived out there very early got used to the stubbornness of Indian follies, and accepted them as commonplace. They gave the savage credit for knowing what he wanted, and let it go at that.