The look on the brave’s face was etched into Odell’s mind as if with a sharp chisel into soft rock. It was the face of the Comanche he’d snuck up on along the creek days before. Thinking back, that moment seemed much farther in the past, as if years and years ago.
“You just keep riding, Mister Injun. You ride as fast and as far as you can, and I’m still going to remember you,” Odell said.
The Prussian rode up with two Comanche heads in one hand and an arrow sticking out of his thigh. He dropped the heads and slid off his horse to sit on the ground. “Herr Odell, come pull this arrow out of me.”
Odell crossed over to him, avoiding the heads. The Prussian wasn’t that much shorter than him, and even broader. The arrow was buried deep in the massive thigh. Odell tried not to look at the severed heads or Israel’s body while he examined the wound.
“I don’t know about this. It’s in pretty deep,” Odell said.
“Pull it out,” the Prussian rasped.
Odell knew that the longer he waited, the harder it was going to be to make himself do it. He grasped the shaft of the arrow and pulled as straight and hard as he could. The first tug didn’t free it, and the Prussian shouted his pain and pounded the ground beside him with one fist.
“Lucifer’s balls, pull it out!”
Odell jerked the arrow again and it came free without the arrowhead. He pitched the shaft aside and pressed his hand to the bleeding hole in the Prussian’s leg. The pressure must have moved the arrowhead within the punctured hole, and the Prussian shouted his pain again. Odell had nothing to bind the wound, and when he let go of it to find something, the blood poured in a steady, percolating pulse.
He ran to Israel’s body and removed the rough cotton shirt. He cut two long strips from it with his knife and folded one of them into a large square. He returned to the Prussian and pressed it against the wound while he tied the other strip firmly around the leg to hold the compress down.
“The odds are the wound will get infected if that’s a hoop-iron point in your leg,” Odell said. All the Indians in Texas gathered barrel hoops and other scrap iron from the settlements and ground out blades and arrowheads from them.
“I’ll probably bleed to death first.” The Prussian tried to laugh but didn’t quite manage it.
“Where’s the rest of your party?” Odell asked.
“By Gott, they turned back home yesterday when we lost the trail for a while.” The Prussian broke into a string of what sounded like cussing, even though it wasn’t in English. “I wish Israel had taken the excuse and gone back with those cowards.”
“Can you ride?” Odell asked. “This grass is like tinder, and if the wind was to swap, that fire’s going to be hard to outrun.”
The Prussian merely nodded his head. The fire had run out of the gully and was rapidly spreading as it raced north in a wall of smoke and blazing grass. Even with the strong south wind the flames had steadily neared them on the downwind side of the gully. The air was thick with smoke and ashes. He made it to his feet with Odell’s help, and the two of them managed to get him mounted. Odell started to get on behind him, but the Prussian pointed to his trophies on the ground.
“Get my heads for me,” the Prussian said.
“No, I don’t think I will.”
“Get them.” The Prussian sidled his horse away, forbidding Odell to swing up behind.
Odell sighed and went over to where the Comanche heads lay in the grass. The Prussian had braided the hair of the two together for a handle, and Odell carried them back and handed them up to him.
“Now go take the head from that Comanche Israel shot off of you.” The Prussian offered Odell his sword.
“You get down and fetch it yourself.” Odell waited until he saw Prussian was resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to gather another trophy. He handed up his rifle for him to hold while he crawled up on the horse behind him.
“What about Mr. Wilson?” Odell asked.
“I assume he is very dead?”
“He’s past helping, but we ought to bury him.”
“Herr Odell, we’ve nothing to dig with. The buzzards and coyotes will tend to him soon enough. We’ll tell his family that we buried him.”
“Still, I hate to leave him lying like that. He’s in kind of a bare spot there, so maybe the fire won’t scorch him.”
“He’s long past caring.”
They walked the horse eastward and the Prussian pointed out the two dead Comanche horses. “Herr Odell, you are a horse killer.”
“Those bucks didn’t give me proper time to aim.”
“Oh, I thought you were aiming for the horses.”
“No, I guess I put up a pretty poor fight.”
The Prussian stopped at the far horse carcass and motioned to the bladder water bag tied to the animal’s neck. “We might need that.”
Odell slid down and fetched it. The Comanche canteen was made from the bladder of a buffalo with the dried flesh molded around a wooden stopper at the drinking end. He slung the carrying strap over his head and mounted back up behind the Prussian.
“You might think you’ve fought poorly, but I’d say you did quite well for a boy so green,” the Prussian said.
Odell didn’t like to be called a boy. “How do you figure that, Karl?”
“Any time you fight Comanches and come out alive, you’ve done okay.”
“I don’t feel like a winner.”
“By Gott, I promise you are, and I’ll wager you’ll get another crack at those red devils if you stay in Texas long enough. That Comanche that got away might be riding right now to get some help to finish us off.”
“I intend to stay after them until I get that Injun that did for Israel.”
“That might be a very long ride indeed.”
“I don’t care how long it takes.”
Odell scanned the country around them for signs of Crow. The black horse apparently hadn’t died where Odell had left him but was nowhere to be seen. Odell whistled as he’d heard Red Wing do, but there was still no sign of Crow. He regretted the loss of the horse terribly but was glad that the animal might survive his wounds if the fire didn’t get him. He continued to whistle while they rode along.
The Prussian altered their course just enough to pass by a clump of mesquite trees. He pulled up beside one of them and hacked a hole in the thorny limbs with his saber, leaving one bare branch about horse height above the ground. He draped the braided handle of the heads over the limb and left them hanging there.
When they were fifty yards away Odell looked back at the heads dangling from the tree. “Why’d you do that?”
“I left them for any Comanche who passes by to see. It lets them know that Major Karl von Roeder was here, and that his blade is sharp.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Forgive me, Herr Odell. I am most impolite. Do you want me to ride back so you can get their scalps?”
“No, just keep on riding. I ain’t much for scalps.”
The Prussian nodded as if he had heard some sage advice. “I’m not fond of scalps either. Heads are much, much better.”
“Texas has to be the hardest place on the earth,” Odell said quietly to himself.
The Prussian heard him. “Indeed, Herr Odell, indeed.”
* * *
Little Bull stopped at his camp in the narrow pass through the hills and watched the two Tejanos heading east. His left arm throbbed where the Running Boy had shot his shield with the big gun. The bullet had failed to penetrate the bull hide, but it had left a deep bruise on his forearm. He had never expected the boy to be such a fighter.
He knew of the Prussian, as word of the strange talking man had spread across Comancheria. The Tonkawas called him Cuts Deep, and the Lipans called him Long Knife Man. The Mexicans and Tejanos called him the Prussian, and there was no doubt the
man was a brave fighter. Little Bull had seen him cut down the two Penatekas like they were helpless children. The Penatekas were soft, but he had to admit the Prussian wasn’t to be taken lightly.
He rose and went to his stolen horses and untied all their hobbles. He kept one fresh mount and waved his arms at the rest of them to run them off. He went and untied his milk cow after they were gone. Alone, he couldn’t take the cow and the horses too. The cow was a greater prize to him, even though horses were the riches Comanches centered their whole economy around.
He climbed on his new horse with the cow’s lead rope in his hand and started north with the black wall of smoke looming behind him in the distance. He already had one hundred horses to his name when he had left his band in camp far up in the Antelope Hills. The cow was something he wanted and did not have. His chest burned and his gut churned bitterly. He would stop and milk the cow that evening, and maybe the cream would cool his angry belly.
He passed the time on the trail by keeping an eye on the progress of the prairie fire and thinking of what he would do to the Running Boy and the Prussian. Tejanos were too foolish to fear the Comanche as they should, and he knew there would come a day when he would have another chance at the two. For some reason he wanted the Running Boy’s scalp the most.
Chapter 7
Odell lugged a hide bucket of water from the creek to the beehive-shaped grass hut where he and the Prussian had been staying for better than a week. According to his hosts it was squaw’s work, but he was getting restless and needed something to do. He hung the bucket on a stob at the doorpost and went to sit down beside the Prussian on a deer-hide rug under the shade of a thatched arbor fronting the hut. The Prussian had his wounded leg propped up on his saddle before him and was running a whetstone up and down the blade of his saber. The stone slid along the metal in long, grating passes that were so evenly spaced as to make a rhythm all their own. Odell’s father used to make such a rhythm when he stropped his straight razor before shaving.
The Prussian was looking unusually sour, and Odell kept quiet. The wounded leg had been slow to heal, and even if it did, the hoop-iron arrowhead lodged in it was probably going to give the Prussian a permanent limp. Odell watched the village stir around them and listened to the whetstone running up and down the blade.
They had been lucky to run across the Wichita village at a time when the Prussian was looking like he might not make it. Without rest and shelter, the loss of blood and the fever that racked his body would have killed him long before they made it back to their homes on Massacre Creek. For two weeks the Wichita medicine man had come to visit them daily, bringing the Prussian vile concoctions of bitter broth and smelly poultices. The wounded Prussian finally appeared to be on the mend, but Odell couldn’t tell if it was the medicinal applications or the healthy dose of gourd-rattling and chanted incantations meant to run off evil spirits that did the trick.
The medicine man was nowhere to be seen, but the rest of the village was already going about their morning business. The Wichitas seemed friendly enough, but Odell hadn’t been quite sure of them when he stumbled across their settlement. His recent experience with Indians had left him more than a little leery.
Like most of the Indians Odell had run across, the men wore breechclouts and moccasins in the summertime and nothing more. The women wore long deerskin dresses, some of them finely decorated with elk teeth and painted designs. They were a short people, and both the men and women wore tattoos on their faces. The men had horizontal lines and dashes running from the corners of their eyes and down their chins. The women had similar lines on their chins and a circle around their mouths. Once he got past their strange looks he found that they were pretty nice folks.
“We were lucky to catch them in their town. They’ll be leaving their crops to go out after buffalo before too long. They plant and harvest between spring and fall, and hunt and gather the rest of the year,” Odell said.
“You’ve learned a lot about them for a man that doesn’t speak their language.” The Prussian never looked up from his blade.
“Old Star, that medicine man, he speaks a little English, a little Spanish, and a whole lot of stuff I don’t understand. But somewhere in the middle of all that I’ve picked up a thing or two, and even learned a little sign language.”
“Don’t you go to trusting these little farmers. I don’t care how much corn and watermelons they eat, they’re still Indians.”
“They took us in when we needed it and seem scared of Comanches.”
“Everybody is scared of Comanches, but don’t think that makes the Wichitas our allies. When the Comanche are in the mood they trade with them, and I’ve even heard they’ve fought together before.”
“Are you saying we aren’t safe here?”
“Herr Odell, I’m saying don’t trust any Indian. No white man can understand how they think. The same warrior that gives you food and shelter one day might scalp you the next.”
“There’s bound to be some good Indians.”
The Prussian adjusted his wounded leg to a more comfortable position. “Yes, but as a whole I don’t trust them. Among their own kind they can appear to be a loving people who sing and dance and live and die just like we do. But that same Indian you see playing with children or telling jokes around the fire might think anybody outside his tribe is an enemy and maybe even less than human. He’ll kill you or torture you and laugh while he’s doing it, like a kid poking around in an ant mound.”
Odell watched the women and children heading to the fields, laughing and telling stories just like his people would to pass the workday. “I trust this bunch.”
“You tend to your scalp, and I’ll tend to mine.” The Prussian smiled thinly and tested the edge of his saber against the hair on the back of his arm. It shaved like a razor.
“That suits me,” Odell said. “I can look out for myself.”
The Prussian gave him a sour look. “You sure don’t know anything about Indians. Just what did you say you were back in the States?”
Odell shrugged. “My pa was a barber, but he was intending to build a riverboat if he had made it to Texas.”
The Prussian shook his head. “No, I want to know what your trade is, or what you’re considering making your living at. This Texas is a place where a man with a little luck and vision might one day make a fortune in land or the right business venture.”
The Prussian’s talk irritated Odell. Pappy too had always prodded and poked and questioned him about what he intended to do with his life. Pappy Spurling had set great store by a man amounting to something, even if was just his own measure of self-worth. Across three states and one failed homestead after another, he had thrown down his farming tools and picked up his rifle every time some big talker came along and claimed the government needed him to fight Indians or Britishers. Pappy proudly claimed he was just doing his part to help build a country. He busted his back breaking ground for the crops he was sure the fickle weather would one day actually allow him to grow, and for all his trouble all he got was hacked to death by some Comanches.
Odell wasn’t sure just what it was his parents had dreamed, but he recalled vague bits and pieces of big ideas and bold hopes that to a young boy sounded as sweet as candy and sure to happen. But in spite of all their praying and hard work and measuring their life by the meager hoard of coins in an old lard can in the cupboard, they ended up broke and then dead on the banks of a muddy river in a place they had never even dreamed of. Who could plan for such?
Odell made no claims on wisdom, but he was sure that anybody who thought they could plot out the course of their life on a calendar was just fooling themselves. Life was just generally unpredictable as hell, and he had learned not to make a habit of thinking past the day at hand. Things were easier that way, and the lumps you took wouldn’t come as any more of a surprise than if you had tried to plan for them.
“I get t
he notion you were a soldier once.” Odell sought to change the subject.
“In my former country, all men of any quality are soldiers.”
“I once heard that horse soldiers don’t keep their swords sharp for fear of cutting their horse on accident.”
“Maybe American soldiers don’t, but Prussian cavalrymen do, or at least some of us did. A dull saber isn’t any better than a club in a fight.”
“You were fighting back where you came from?”
“I am a hussar. I have always fought, as did my family before me. My father charged the French emplacements at the Battle of Leipzig with nothing more than a pistol and a saber in his hands. He and his men charged two more times with just their sabers.”
“That sounds like some fierce fighting.”
The Prussian let out a scoffing hiss of air and shook his head. “The French are not made for war. They are better at sipping wine and bragging about their own art.”
“I heard you fought with Houston at San Jacinto.”
“I was there.”
“I’m going with the Wichitas on their buffalo hunt,” Odell said.
“What if you run across some Comanches and these new friends of yours sell you out?”
“It’s a chance I’ll take.”
“By Gott, even if they don’t get you killed, how do you think you’re going to find the Comanches you’re looking for when it’s hard enough just finding any kind of Comanche?” The Prussian waggled his saber point at Odell for emphasis like a shaking finger.
“I know I wouldn’t recognize most of Pappy’s killers if I came face-to-face with them, but I’ll never forget one of them. He was the one that killed Mr. Israel, and I’m going to try and find him,” Odell said. “I’m going to give it until winter, or maybe spring. I owe Pappy and Israel that much.”
“I’ve my farm waiting for me and I’m going home as soon as I’m well enough,” the Prussian said.
“Maybe you think Red Wing’s waiting for you?”
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