Despite his travels, he had seen Comanches only twice since leaving the Prussian the fall before. The first time came when a small bunch of decrepit old men and a handful of squaws had come into the Wichita hunting camp to trade. They were a pitiful, starving lot who seemed to have come on hard times. Apparently their headman had gotten himself and his relatives kicked out of his former band over some gambling feud. Odell could find none of his recent hatred for Comanches when he looked at them.
His last encounter with the Comanches was after he had left the Wichitas to wander the Llano. He had topped a swell of land and stumbled right into a Comanche camp. There must have been at least forty lodges there, and he was almost in the middle of them before he knew it. By the time he recognized his predicament, the squaws going about their chores and the children on horse guard were already yelling warnings. Several braves returning from a hunt had closed off retreat behind him. There was nothing left to do but stick the spurs to Crow and ride right through the Comanche camp. He was there and gone before the highly surprised Comanches even had a chance to get a good look at the crazy white man on the fast black horse.
The predicament Odell was in at the moment felt like running that gauntlet all over again. A large herd of horses was scattered out some two hundred yards from the Comanche camp, and that meant there were guards about. His pappy used to tell him that sometimes you had to sink or swim, and he had come too far to back out. The moon was just a sliver in the sky, and he dismounted and led Crow among the herd, staying close to the horse’s side. He stopped and started intermittently, hoping any sleepy guard would mistake Crow for just another grazing horse.
The night was dark, and he moved toward the camp more by feel than anything else. He tried to picture just how far from the camp he had seen the Comanche horses watering during the afternoon before. He could see the Comanches’ fires glowing through the hides of the nearest tepees, and he had no wish to get any closer to them than he had to. As it was, he was barely sixty yards from the edge of the camp when he almost stepped into the shallow creek before he saw it. He knelt beside Crow and lifted a handful of water to his lips. His nerves were wound tight, and the drops that escaped from his cupped palm sounded incredibly loud to him in the stillness.
He drank slowly and long, enjoying the cool water coursing through his body. When neither he nor Crow could hold another drop, he filled his water bag and started back the way he had come. He heard someone cough nearby, and his return trip seemed to take even longer than the eternity he had spent making his way to the water.
Once he was high above the draw, he climbed back in the saddle and started southeast. The safest thing for him to do was to ride by night until he was far away from the Comanches. The stars were bright overhead, but he knew nothing of navigating by the heavens. The San Saba River lay somewhere to the southeast, and he hoped he couldn’t miss it. He looped his reins around his saddle horn and trusted Crow to keep them pointed in the general direction they needed to go. The water had saved him, but now that he was not dying of thirst he realized just how hungry he was. He dozed off and on in the saddle and dreamed of fried venison dipped in honey and glass after glass of cold buttermilk.
Come daylight he was twenty miles beyond the Comanche camp. His hunger was so great that it became all he could think about. The sight of a herd of antelope grazing his way excited him greatly, and he dismounted and took a stand behind a yucca bush to see if they might pass within rifle range of him. The buck must have spotted him, for he circled his little harem around Odell until he was straight downwind. Odell had only two more bullets left and barely enough powder to put behind them. There was nothing left to replace the last charge in his shotgun barrel. He debated on risking a long-range shot. Any Comanches around were sure to hear it, and he wasn’t going to put up much of a defense with so little ammunition as was left to him. Just as he made up his mind to try a shot anyway, the entire bunch winded him and ran off with their white bottoms flashing and bounding away at a speed that made even Crow look slow.
Odell mounted up, and by afternoon he felt so light and hollow he feared he might blow away. The day was hot and the whole country seemed like a sweaty dream. He prayed for a buffalo, or anything that resembled good red meat. He must have gotten lost in his fancies of bountiful game prancing all around him, for he found that Crow had stopped in the middle of a wide-open plain with little of anything that could be considered a landmark. Even the high, flat-topped mountain that he had kept behind his right shoulder all morning had vanished in the distance. Odell had no clue whether he had stopped the horse, or if Crow had decided to take a break of his own accord. He studied the horizon all around him and wasn’t even sure they were still headed east.
Some movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention, and before he could see what it was, something else moved right in front of him. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the little critters sitting on their haunches and staring back at him. They were about the size of a cottontail rabbit and looked something like a fat-bodied squirrel without the bushy tail.
He finally got his brain wrapped around the fact that he was looking at a huge prairie dog colony. He hadn’t heard of anyone eating prairie dogs, but looking at them right then, he was quite sure they were the tastiest morsels on the face of the earth. He caught himself dreaming again and got down off his horse.
The little varmints sat by the mounds of earth around their burrows and craned their necks to study him and twitched their stubby tails. He hated to use up his last shotgun load, but the more he thought about what a prairie dog might taste like, the more practical it seemed. The trouble was getting into range before they ducked into their holes.
He slipped toward one bunch of them after another with Crow following loyally behind. Every time he was almost close enough to shoot, they disappeared into their dens. They waited until he had gone on in pursuit of their more distant neighbors and popped right back out behind him. They gave out shrill little whistles to warn each other, and he soon realized that he had been led along a giant circle through the dog town. It was if they were playing with him. He needed food in a most dire, primal sort of way, but the hunt was becoming a matter of honor. A strong dislike of prairie dogs began to build within him.
A particularly bold little rascal kept popping up some seventy yards away from him, and Odell tried a new tactic. If he stared directly at the animal, it would dive back into its hole, but if he kept sideways to it and didn’t make eye contact, it didn’t seem so nervous. Odell avoided looking that way and ambled along as if he were focused on something else. He chose a course that would take him near the prairie dog, without appearing to be stalking it. He was only forty yards away when he whirled and fired the shotgun. All he saw was a flash of brown fur as it disappeared in an explosion of dirt.
Odell shouted his victory and ran to the hole. When he arrived he saw only chewed earth, and no carcass. He fell to his knees and cocked his eye right over burrow opening. He remained on hands and knees, swapping eyes occasionally, but continuing to stare down the hole. He finally looked up and noticed a prairie dog sitting on a mound straight out in front of him. Starvation messed with his mind, and he wasn’t at his rational best. As a result, he was sure it was the very same one who had dodged his shot.
“You think you’re smart, don’t you? Well, you have to get up mighty early in the morning to fool Odell Spurling.”
Little white caliche rocks littered the ground, and he gathered one up. He threw it as hard as he could, but the prairie dog ducked into its hole. It quickly dawned on him that his aim and his velocity were no match for their reflexes or their sharp eyes.
He wondered how bad his big-bore rifle would tear up one of them while he waited for the dog to pop back up and laugh at him. He thought about how many times he had passed through prairie dog towns, and taken them for granted. Never had he imagined what devious little creatures they really were. Right then h
e promised himself that as soon as he got back to civilization he would purchase a couple of kegs of black powder and come back. Imagining the explosion and hundreds of prairie dogs blown from their holes soothed his wounded pride.
One of the enemy popped up in front of him. He watched the little whiskered nose curl up in a sneer as it rose up as high as it could on its haunches. He reared back to let fly with another rock, but the prairie dog disappeared in a flash. Odell drew his knife and charged toward the hole bellowing like a mad bull. It wasn’t just food he wanted, it was a reckoning.
He stabbed wildly down the hole with the knife. When he realized the little genius had evaded him, he began to attack the burrow itself. He dug with the ferocity of a badger, and great spurts of dirt flew out between his legs and behind him. When he had worked down a foot, and widened the hole sufficiently enough to get one shoulder in, he stopped to listen. His keen hearing detected a faint sound.
“Now we’ll see who has the last laugh.” Odell was already laughing very oddly.
He dug more, and the sound grew louder and nearer. He plunged his arm into the burrow all the way up to his shoulder and his fingers groped blindly to find the prairie dog’s hide. Something bit his hand, and he angrily shoved farther into the hole. His fingers wrapped around a victim, and he had drug it halfway out before it dawned on him that it was no prairie dog in his grasp. A shiver ran down his spine and he let go and scrambled back from the hole. Instead of fur he had felt scaly hide.
The rough treatment put the four-foot rattlesnake in a foul mood. It coiled at the mouth of the burrow and rattled its tail in fierce indignation. Odell raked the diamondback along the ground with his rifle until he could stomp its head. He decapitated it with his knife and flopped down beside it to examine his wound.
Two fang holes punctured the web of his right thumb, and he wondered if he was going to die. He remembered that one of his neighbor girls back in Georgia had died from a rattlesnake bite while picking huckleberries. Such thoughts weren’t good for his morale. He reminded himself that the girl had been bitten on the neck by a seven-foot snake with a head bigger than a grown man’s fist, and not just any run-of-the-mill, little prairie rattler.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he recalled hearing that the flesh of a serpent was supposed to be able to draw out venom. He quickly skinned and gutted it, and cut a cross section of the pale white meat. He held the snake meat poultice to his wound while he scowled at the prairie dog only a few yards away. The rodent seemed especially proud of itself and amused by the clumsy human’s antics. Odell waved his good hand to scare it off, but the animal just sat there and stared.
“Dumb prairie dogs,” Odell muttered.
He went and gathered enough dead yucca stalks to build a fire. He soon had a tiny blaze going, and meat roasting over it. He had no way of knowing if the snake’s flesh would draw the poison from his body, but his stomach could well make use of some nourishment. Never would he have pictured himself eating such a thing, but after the first bite he decided that prairie dog would surely be poor doings compared to rattlesnake.
He finished off almost half of the snake and lay down beside the fire with a fresh piece of it held against his hand. He thought the pain had gotten better but decided it wouldn’t hurt to rest a little. He felt the prairie dogs’ beady little eyes on him, but he was too tired to worry about what evil plans they were hatching.
The stirring of Crow grazing around him and the hot sun scalding his face woke him after a long nap. His hand was swollen to twice its normal size and turning black. He was as thirsty as he’d been the day before, and he went to Crow and took down his water bag. He guzzled greedily and then poured some in his hat for the horse.
While Crow drank, Odell leaned against his saddle. He felt even sicker than he had before he fell asleep, and his whole right arm ached terribly. He tried to recall all the things he knew about snakebites and hoped he wouldn’t lose his arm. There were dark streaks running up from his wrist, and he wondered if he would have to watch the poison spread through him one limb at a time.
The threat to his appendages brought the crazy Mexican to mind, and the image of spending the rest of his life limbless and worming around in the dust wasn’t a pretty one. He had just about convinced himself that he was doomed to die a most heinous death when he looked across his saddle and saw a dozen Comanche warriors coming across the flat barely two hundred yards away. He looked to his little pile of ashes and knew that his smoke had called them to him.
Death by venom was much preferred to what the Comanches could dish out. He grabbed up his gun and the snakeskin and hit the saddle. He slapped Crow across the hip with the snake hide, and they lit out of there hell-bent for leather and barely three jumps ahead of the Comanches yipping and yelling at their heels. Crow must have been just as leery of Indians and rattlesnakes as his rider was, for he was motivated to a speed even Odell hadn’t guessed he possessed.
It was a pretty close race for a mile, and Odell was praying Crow didn’t trip or falter. His only chance lay in outrunning his pursuers, and Crow didn’t disappoint him. Odell continued to whip him with the snakeskin, and after another bit the Comanches had fallen back to a more proper distance. Odell slowed Crow to a lope and then to a trot. He looked behind him and saw that the Comanches had pulled up, their horses used up after such a long sprint. Odell stopped Crow and slid off of him. The horse seemed to be breathing fine, but for the first time Odell really recognized just how thin and used he looked.
“Partner, you are starting to look like I feel,” Odell said.
Crow shook the lather from his sides and tried to rub his sweaty bridle off on Odell’s chest. Odell led the horse on, keeping an eye on their back trail, lest they have to run again. He intended to walk and rest Crow for a while, but he wasn’t sure how long his own legs would hold up. He felt like death warmed over and hoped it wasn’t far to the San Saba.
He thought they might make it if his hand didn’t rot off, or if they didn’t run out of water or rattlesnakes before they got there. Men who knew better might have called him a damned fool for such optimism, but he was sure that a little luck and a fast horse could see a man through some awful hard times.
And the Comanches had already begun to speak of him around their campfires at night. Word of the Running Boy who wandered the prairie alone spread from camp to camp and band to band throughout Comancheria. Many young warriors dreamed of taking the scalp of the young white giant who shot the big gun, used a rattlesnake for a quirt, and rode a horse as black as a thundercloud and as fast as the wind.
Chapter 14
The Waco escort Chief Squash had promised wasn’t to be. Instead of a healthy bunch of warriors that would follow his lead, what the Peace Commission found was a village with half its population taken sick with a fever. Squash’s wife hadn’t eaten in two days, and lay in a sweaty state of delirium. The demons that ailed her were too strong for the healers, and Squash appealed to Commissioner Anderson to see if his white man’s medicine could save her and the rest of the sick.
“I would just ride on. Indians are notional and superstitious folks. None of us are doctors and whatever illness has taken a hold of this camp looks to be bad.” Captain Jones surveyed the village cautiously and wouldn’t even dismount.
“Are you sure it ain’t the pox?” Jim, the leader of the Delaware scouts, asked. He was the only one of his trio of tribesmen who would even ride in. The other two sat their horses at the edge of the village, having a somber discussion.
Red Wing could understand Jim’s fear, because he was called Jim Pockmark. The pitted scars on his face let it be known that he had already suffered from the disease and lived to tell about it, as had Red Wing herself. No Indian survivor, or white for that matter, ever lost their fear of the killer that wiped out entire villages.
“It isn’t smallpox.” Agent Torrey followed Squash out of the lodge. He shoved his glasses
back up his nose and looked up at the party still on their horses before the door. “She has a bad fever and nausea, but no lesions.”
“It ain’t the typhoid or cholera, is it?” Captain Jones asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Commissioner Anderson looked to Chief Squash. “Is it the same with all the rest of the sick ones?”
Squash merely nodded, his sly old eyes all but pleading.
“How long have they been sick?”
“Three days,” Squash said.
“I’m telling you, don’t get mixed up in this,” Captain Jones said quietly.
Commissioner Anderson considered his predicament with a frown. “We need Squash’s help, and we need the food he can supply us with.”
Captain Jones looked to the corn, watermelon, and squash plants growing in the river bottom field just outside the village. “It’s too early yet for them to supply us. The first of their crops won’t be producing for another month.”
“Jim and his Delawares may squawk about Squash being our Indian ambassador on this expedition, but he’s the only one that has had any contact with the Comanche and can speak their language. You know as well as I do that the Comanche would just as soon kill a Delaware as a white man. Our mission would be in serious jeopardy without Squash.”
Captain Jones studied the fat chief disapprovingly. Squash was notoriously crafty, despite a reputation for being helpful. He had lived in peace with the Texans for years, but his motivations were always driven by what he could get in exchange for his goodwill, whether it was material goods or simply aid in the defeat of his tribe’s traditional enemies. His guttural English was plenty good for him to understand everything they were saying.
“I don’t trust him one bit,” the captain whispered.
“Neither do I, but he’s our ticket to meeting peacefully with the Comanche.”
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