by Alan Lemay
They went back to the supply tent, and the adjutant took them inside. The commanding officer was there, sorting through a great mass of loot with the aid of two sergeants and a company clerk. The adjutant identified his superior as Colonel Russell M. Hannon. They had heard of him, but never seen him before; he hadn’t been out here very long. Just now he looked tired, but in high spirits.
“Too bad there wasn’t more of ’em,” Colonel Hannon said. “That’s the only disappointing thing. We were following the river, not their trail. Wichita scouts brought word there must be a million of ’em. What with the snow, and the night march, an immediate attack was the only course permissible.”
He said his troops had killed thirty-eight hostiles, with the loss of two men. Comanches, at that. A ratio of nineteen to one, as compared to Colonel Custer’s ratio of fourteen to one against Black Kettle at the Battle of the Washita. “Not a bad little victory. Not bad at all.”
Mart saw Amos stir, and worried for a moment. But Amos held his tongue.
“Four hundred ninety-two ponies,” said Hannon. “Had to shoot ’em, of course. Wild as antelope—no way to hold onto them. Four captives recovered. Unfortunately the hostiles murdered them, as we developed the village. Now, if some of this junk will only show what Comanches we defeated, we’ll be in the fair shape to write a report. Those Wichita scouts know nothing what ever about anything; most ignorant savages on earth. However—”
“What you had there,” said Amos wearily, “was Chief Bluebonnet, with what’s left of the Wolf Brothers, along with a few Nawyecky. Or maybe you call ’em Noconas.”
“Get this down,” the Colonel told the clerk.
It was going to take a long time to find out just who had fought and died at the riverbend—and who had got away into the night and the snow, and so still lived, somewhere upon the winter plain. Even allowing for the great number of dead and dying the Comanches had carried away uncounted, somewhere between a third and a half of Bluebonnet’s people must have escaped.
They were glad to help sort through the wagon-load of stuff hastily snatched up in the gloom of the dawn before the lodges were set on fire. Some of the pouches, quivers, and squill breastplates were decorated with symbols Mart or Amos could connect with Indian names; they found insignia belonging to Stone Wolf, Curly Horn, Pacing Bear, and Hears-the-Wind-Talk. The patterns they didn’t know they tried to memorize, in hopes of seeing them again someday.
Especially valued by Colonel Harmon, as exonerating his attack in the dark, was certain stuff that had to be the loot from raided homesteads: a worn sewing basket, an embroidered pillow cover, a home-carved wooden spoon. Hard to see what the Comanches would want with a store-bought paper lamp shade, a wooden seat for a chamber pot, or an album of pressed flowers. But if someone recognized these poor lost things someday, they would become evidence connecting the massacred Comanches with particular crimes. One incriminating bit was a mail pouch known to have been carried by a murdered express rider. The contents were only half rifled; some Comanche had been taking his time about opening all the letters—no man would ever know what for.
But the thing Mart found that hit him hard, and started his search all over again, was in a little heap of jewelry—Indian stuff mostly: Carved amulets, Mexican and Navajo silver work, sometimes set with turquoise; but with a sprinkling of pathetic imitation things, such as frontiersmen could afford to buy for their women. Only thing of interest, at first sight, seemed to be a severed finger wearing a ring which would not pull off. Mart cynically supposed that any stuff of cash value had stayed with the troopers who collected it.
Then Mart found Debbie’s locket.
It was the cheapest kind of a gilt-washed metal heart on a broken chain. Mart himself had given it to Debbie on the Christmas when she was three. It wasn’t even a real locket, for it didn’t open, and had embarrassed him by making a green spot on her throat every time she wore it. But Debbie had hung on to it. On the back it said “Debbie from M,” painfully scratched with the point of his knife.
Both officers showed vigorous disinterest as Mart pressed for the circumstances in which the locket had been found. These were professionals, and recognized the question as of the sort leading to full-dress investigations, and other chancy outcomes, if allowed to develop. But Amos came to Mart’s support, and presently they found the answer simply by walking down the mess line with the locket in hand.
The locket had been taken from the body of a very old squaw found in the river along with an ancient buck. No, damn it, the Colonel explained, of course they had not meant to kill women and children, and watch your damn tongue. All you could see was a bunch of shapeless figures firing on you—nothing to do but cut them down, and save questions for later. But one of the sergeants remembered how these two bodies had come there. The squaw, recognizable in hindsight as the fatter one, had tried to escape through the river on a pony, and got sabered down. The old man had rushed in trying to save the squaw, and got sabered in turn. Nothing was in hand to tell who these people were.
Colonel Hannon saw to it that the locket was properly tagged and returned to the collection as evidence of a solved child stealing. Restitution would be made to the heirs, upon proper application to the Department, with proof of loss.
“She was there,” Mart said to Amos. “She was there in that camp. She’s gone with them that got away.”
Amos did not comment. They had to follow and find the survivors—perhaps close at hand, if they were lucky; otherwise by tracing them to what ever far places they might scatter. This time neither one of them said “Tomorrow.”
Chapter Twenty-one
They had been winter-driven that first time they went home, all but out of horse flesh, and everything else besides. But after the “Battle” of Dead-horse Bend they went home only because all leads very soon staled and petered out in the part of the country where they were. Otherwise, they probably would have stayed out and kept on. They had lived on the wild land so long that they needed nothing, not even money, that they did not know how to scratch out of it. It never occurred to them that their search was stretching out into a great extraordinary feat of endurance; an epic of hope without faith, of fortitude without reward, of stubbornness past all limits of reason. They simply kept on, doing the next thing, because they always had one more place to go, following out one more forlorn-hope try.
And they had one more idea now. It had been spelled out for them in the loot Colonel Han-non’s troopers had picked up in the wreckage of Bluebonnet’s destroyed village. Clear and plain, once you thought of it, though it had taken them weeks of thinking back over the whole thing before they recognized it. Amos, at least, believed that this time they could not fail. They would find Debbie now—if only she still lived.
Their new plan would carry them far into the southwest into country hundreds of miles from any they had ever worked before. And so long as they had to go south, home was not too far out of the way. Home? What was that? Well, it was the place they used to live; where the Mathisons still lived—so far as they knew—and kept an eye on the cattle that now belonged to Debbie. Mart would always think of that stretch of country as home, though nothing of his own was there, nor anybody waiting for him.
As they rode, a sad, dark thing began to force itself upon their attention. When they came to the country where the farthest-west fringe of ranches had been, the ranches were no longer there. Often only a ghostly chimney stood, solitary upon the endless prairie, where once had been a warm and friendly place with people living in it. Then they would remember the time they had stopped by, and things they had eaten there, and the little jokes the people had made. If you hunted around in the brush that ran wild over all, you could usually find the graves. The remembered people were still there, under the barren ground.
More often you had to remember landmarks to locate where a place had been at all. Generally your horse stumbled over an old footing or something before you saw the flat place where the little house had been.
Sometimes you found graves here, too, but more usually the people had simply pulled their house down and hauled the lumber away, retreating from a place the Peace Policy had let become too deadly, coming on top of the war. You got the impression that Texas had seen its high tide, becoming little again as its frontier thinned away. Sundown seemed to have come for the high hopes of the Lone Star Republic to which Union had brought only war, weakening blood losses, and the perhaps inevitable neglect of a defeated people.
On the morning of the last day, with Mathison’s layout only twenty-odd miles away, they came upon one more crumbling chimney, lonely beside a little stream. Mart’s eyes rested upon it contemplatively across the brush at five hundred yards without recognizing it. He was thinking what a dreadful thing it would be if they came to the Mathisons, and found no more than this left of the place, or the people. Then he saw Amos looking at him strangely, and he knew what he was looking at. Surprising that he had not known it, even though he had not been here in a long time. The chimney marked the site of the old Pauley homestead; the place where he had been born. Here the people who had brought him into the world had loved him, and cared for him; here they had built their hopes, and here they had died. How swiftly fade the dead from people’s minds, if he could look at this place and not even know it! He turned his horse and rode toward it, Amos following without question.
He had no memory of his own of how this homestead had looked, and no faintest images of his people’s faces. He had been taken over this ground, and had all explained to him when he was about eight years old, but no one had ever been willing to talk to him about it, else. And now, except for the chimney, he couldn’t locate where anything had been at all. The snow had gone off, but the ground was frozen hard, so that their heels rang metallically upon it as they dismounted to walk around. The little stream ran all year, and it had a fast ripple in it that never froze, where it passed this place; so that the water seemed to talk forever to the dead. This creek was called the Beanblossom; Mart knew that much. And that was about all.
Amos saw his bewilderment. “Your old m—your father wagoned the Santa Fe Trail a couple of times,” he said, “before he settled down. Them Santa Fe traders, if any amongst ’em died, they buried ’em ahead in the trail; so every dang ox in the train tromped over the graves. Didn’t want the Indians to catch on they were doing poorly. Or maybe dig ’em up. So your father was against markers on graves. Out here, anyways. Knowing that, and after some argument, we never set none up.”
Mart had supposed he knew where the graves were anyway. They had been plainly visible when he had been shown, but now neither mound nor depression showed where they were. The brush had advanced, and under the brush the wind and the rain of the years had filled and packed and planed and sanded the sterile earth until no trace showed anywhere of anything having crumbled to dust beneath.
Amos picked a twig and chewed it as he waded into the brush, taking cross-sightings here and there, trying to remember. “Right here,” he said finally. “This is where your mother lies.” He scraped a line with the toe of his boot, the frozen ground barely taking the mark. “Here’s the foot of the grave.” He stepped aside, and walked around on undefined space, and made another mark. “And here’s the head, here.”
A great gawky bunch of chaparral grew in the middle of what must be the side line of the grave. Mart stood staring at the bit of earth, in no way distinguishable from any other part of the prairie surface. He was trying to remember, or to imagine, the woman whose dust was there. Amos seemed to understand that, too.
“Your mother was a beautiful girl,” he said. Mart felt ashamed as he shoved out of his mind the thought that what ever she looked like, Amos would have said that same thing of the dead. “Real thin,” Amos said, mouthing his twig, “but real pretty just the same. Brown eyes, almost what you’d call black. But her hair. Red-brown, and a lot of it. With a shine in it, like a gold kind of red, when the light struck through it right. I never seen no prettier hair.”
He was silent a few moments, as if to let Mart think for a decent interval about the mother he did not remember. Then Amos got restless, and measured off a long step to the side. “And this here’s Ethan—your father,” he said. “You favor him, right smart. He had a black-Welsh streak; marked his whole side of the family. It’s from him you got your black look and them mighty-near crockery eyes. He was just as dark, with the same light eyes.”
Amos turned a little, and chewed the twig, but didn’t bother to pace off the locations of the others. “Alongside lies my brother—mine and Henry’s brother. The William you’ve heard tell of so many, many times. I don’t know why, but in the family, we never once did call him Bill.... William was the best of us. The best by far. Good looking as Henry, and strong as me. And the brains of the family—there they lie, right there. He could been governor, or anything. Except he was less than your age—just eighteen….” Mart didn’t let himself question the description, even in his mind. You could assume that the first killed in a family of boys was the one who would have been great. It was what they told you always.
“Beyond, the three more—next to William lies Cash Dennison, a young rider, helping out Ethan; then them two bullwhackers that lived out the wagon-train killing, and made it to here. One’s name was Caruthers, from a letter in his pocket; I forget the other. Some blamed them for the whole thing—thought the Comanches come down on this place a-chasing them two. But I never thought that. Seems more like the Comanch’ was coming here; and it was the wagon train they fell on by accident on their way.”
“You got any notion—does anybody know—did they get many of the Comanches? Here, the night of this thing?”
Amos shook his head. “A summer storm come up. A regular cloudburst—you don’t see the like twice in twenty year. It washed out the varmints’ trail. And naturally they carried off their dead—such as there was. Nobody knows how many. Maybe none.”
Waste, thought Mart. Useless, senseless, heartbreaking waste. All these good, fine, happy lives just thrown away....
Once more Amos seemed to answer his thought. “Mart, I don’t know as I ever said this to anybody. But it’s been a long time; and I’ll tell you now what I think. My family’s gone now, too—unless and until we find our one last little girl. But we lived free of harm, and the Mathisons too, for full eighteen years before they struck our bunch again. You want to know what I think why? I think your people here bought that time for us. They paid for it with their lives.”
“Wha-at?” No matter what losses his people had inflicted on the raiders, Comanches would never be stopped by that. They would come back to even the score, and thus the tragic border war went on forever. But that wasn’t what Amos meant.
“I think this was a revenge raid,” Amos said. “It was right here the Rangers come through, trailing old Iron Shirt’s band. They cut that bunch down from the strongest there was to something trifling, and killed Iron Shirt himself. So the trail the Rangers followed that time had a black history for Comanches. They come down it just once in revenge for their dead—and Ethan’s little place was the farthest out on this trail. And it was a whole Indian generation before they come again. That’s why I say—your people bought them years the rest of us lived in peace....”
Mart said. “It’s been a long time. Do you think my father would mind now if I come and put markers on them graves? Would that be a foolishness after all this while?”
Amos chewed, eating his twig. “I don’t believe he’d mind. Not now. Even could he know. I think it would be a right nice thing to do. I’ll help you soon’s we have a mite of time.” He turned toward the horses, but Mart wanted to know one thing more that no one had ever told him.
“I don’t suppose—” he said—“well, maybe you might know. Could you show me where I was when Pa found me in the brush?”
“Your Pa? When?”
“I mean Henry. He always stood in place of my own. I heard tell he found me, and picked me up....”
Amos
looked all around, and walked into the brush, chewing slowly, and taking sights again. “Here,” he said at last. “I’m sure now. Right— exactly—here.” The frost in the earth crackled as he ground a heel into the spot he meant. “Of course, then, the brush was cleared back. To almost this far from the house.” He stood around a moment to see if Mart wanted to ask anything more, then walked off out of the brush toward the horses.
This place, this very spot he stood on, Mart thought, was where he once awoke alone in such terror as locked his throat, seemingly; they had told him he made no sound. Queer to stand here, in this very spot where he had so nearly perished before he even got started; queer, because he felt nothing. It was the same as when he had stood looking at the graves, knowing that what was there should have meant so much, yet had no meaning for him at all. He couldn’t see anything from here that looked familiar, or reminded him of anything.
Of course, that night of the massacre, he hadn’t been standing up better than six feet tall in his boots. He had been down in the roots of the scrub, not much bigger than his own foot was now. On an impulse, Mart lay down in the tangle, pressing his cheek against the ground, to bring his eyes close to the roots.
A bitter chill crept along the whole length of his body. The frozen ground seemed to drain the heat from his blood, and the blood from his heart itself. Perhaps it was that, and knowing where he was, that accounted for what happened next. Or maybe scars, almost as old as he was, were still in existence down at the bottom of his mind, long buried under everything that had happened in between. The sky seemed to darken, while a ringing, buzzing sound came into his ears, and when the sky was completely black it began to redden with a bloody glow. His stomach dropped from under his heart, and a horrible fear filled him—the fear of a small helpless child, abandoned and alone in the night. He tried to spring up and out of that, and he could not move; he lay there rigid, seemingly frozen to the ground. Behind the ringing in his ears began to rise the unearthly yammer of the terror-dream—not heard, not even remembered, but coming to him like an awareness of something happening in some unknown dimension not of the living world.