The Texans

by Brett Cogburn

  “You sound like an Indian lover,” Odell said a little mockingly.

  “Hell, no. If it’s going to be them or us, I know who I’m rooting for. Those damned Comanches ain’t easy to love, and if we want Texas for ourselves I’d say we ought to be glad that there’s such a hateful bunch to take it away from. That way we won’t have anything to feel guilty about afterward.”

  They loped along in silence for another mile. Odell was willing to let the conversation go at that, but it seemed to be bothering the old scout.

  “You’d better remember where you’re at. Texas ain’t like no other place. I love her to death, but she’s hard and she’s mean.” Son raised his voice over the wind that had picked up speed throughout the afternoon until it was bending the grass over and blowing up waves of dust. “The Comanches have to go, but you stay out here long enough and you’ll start to live more and more like them.”

  There wasn’t time for them to argue more, for Placido had stopped just ahead of them on the edge of a bit of canyon country stretching across the plains. The Prussian’s force had finally reached the Clear Fork of the Brazos after three days of hard riding from the San Saba. On their way north they had experienced relatively easy traveling on the prairie divides between one river and the next ever since they crossed the Concho. Their route took them east of the high escarpment of the Staked Plains, and they avoided the canyons and rugged country that footed it. The Tonks had led them to good water for the most part, and scattered herds of buffalo kept them fed even at the speed they traveled. Nobody thus far had to eat their saddles as Son had predicted.

  Placido led them out onto an eroded point overlooking the river. A handful of Tonk scouts had dismounted and were sitting in the shade of their horses, watching the country across the river. Placido and Son got down and loosened their cinches and motioned Odell to do the same. The prairie they had come from dropped off into a rugged area of bluffs and shallow, eroded canyons. A few miles or so across the river Odell could see open country again.

  While the rest of them sat and stared at the horizon, Odell leaned against Crow with his arms draped over the saddle seat. He wasn’t sure what they were looking for, but assumed they were scouting out possible ambush by the Comanche. He tried to be patient and will himself to a careful study of the terrain, but his stomach was cramping too badly for him to focus properly.

  His guts gurgled violently and suddenly, and he walked away from his companions at as fast a pace as he dared while still maintaining control of his bowels. He barely made the privacy of a little clump of salt cedars a few yards away without messing himself. He could hear the Tonks laughing at him while he squatted in the bushes, and knew that his white butt must be visible through the limbs. The diarrhea that had plagued him since the day before was too much misery to worry about his loss of dignity. He finally pulled up his pants and tried to ignore the jeering grins on the Tonks’ faces as he made his way back to the group.

  “Got the gyp-water squirts, do ya?” Son obviously found Odell’s ailment humorous.

  “I’ve been like this ever since we stopped at that little creek north of the Concho. Everything I eat or drink runs straight through me, and I’m cramping so bad I can barely sit up straight,” Odell said.

  “Mix you up some salt water tonight with a little pinch of gunpowder and drink it. That always works for me.” Son pointed to the north. “We can’t have you shitting yourself to death before those Comanches yonder get a chance at you.”

  Odell strained to make out the enemies Son was pointing toward. He expected to see Comanches riding down the river, but no matter how hard he looked he saw nothing. Son noticed and pointed toward a little steep-sided canyon running north out of the river. A thin finger of smoke trickled from it.

  “Comanche camp, maybe,” Placido observed.

  “How’s he know it’s Comanches?” Odell studied the Tonk chief cautiously. Son’s explanation of Indian ways had made some sense to him, but Odell still couldn’t quit thinking about Placido being a cannibal, and a man who laughed at white men with the drizzling shits.

  Son looked at him like he was stupid for asking a question with such an obvious answer. Had Odell waited a few seconds before opening his mouth, it would have saved him some embarrassment. He promised himself to ask no more stupid questions. It stood to reason nobody else was going to be foolish enough to build a smoky fire right in the middle of Comancheria—unless they had found the Peace Commission at last.

  Placido mounted again, and the rest of them followed his lead. They rode back and met the Prussian at the head of the long line of his volunteers. Despite the grassy plain they had come across, all the men were caked in dust, their faces almost white with it except where the sweat had washed it away in streaks. They were spread out for a quarter of a mile at a steady walk with a sort of grim determination about them that reminded Odell of a herd of buffalo on the move.

  The Prussian calmly listened to his scouts’ report, and then turned back to face the men spreading out behind him. “By Gott, the Tonks have found Comanches across the river, and we are going to pay them a visit.”

  Nobody cheered or chunked their hats in the air, but every man of them went to checking his weapons and gear. Quiet words were passed, and in the matter of a few minutes the party was split in two. Placido and Son led one half of them to the east, intending to circle around and come on the Comanche camp from the north. The Prussian held the rest behind to give them time to get in position.

  “I don’t see any need in picking a fight here when we’re supposed to be after the Peace Commission,” Odell said to Son as they crossed the river.

  “The Prussian isn’t going to pass up a chance to kill Comanches,” Son said.

  They were within a mile of the smoke trailing up out of the canyon, and Odell couldn’t tell if it was the gyp water or his nerves causing the butterflies in his stomach. He had checked the priming on his rifle three times and couldn’t seem to find a comfortable position in his saddle. Talking helped calm him.

  “The Prussian said he wanted to catch a big camp of them. That’s what he promised these men,” Odell said.

  Son scowled at him for his chatter. “If he passes up this bunch, he won’t have anyone left to follow him. These men ain’t the sort to tolerate a coward.”

  “But what about all the talk of striking the Comanches a big blow?”

  “Just because there’s only one smoke coming out of that draw doesn’t mean we ain’t in for a fight. Anytime you’re after Injuns expect surprises. I’ve seen many the time when I’d have sworn so many Injuns couldn’t have been hidden in a draw or gully, and they still came boiling out like hornets from a nest.”

  “But . . .”

  “But nothing. Those tracks we ran across were made by at least forty warriors and their families. If it’s them in that canyon, we’re in for a fight. You just keep your trap shut and pay heed to what I do. Depending on what the Tonks have to report, our aim is to run off the Comanches’ horses while the Prussian and his bunch come hell-bent for leather up the canyon,” Son said.

  One of the Tonks came loping back from the rim of the canyon and talked briefly with Placido, who soon sent him racing to the Prussian’s force. Son left Odell and went to talk with the chief. By the time Odell caught back up to him, everyone was riding on.

  “What’s the matter? They’re all acting like there isn’t going to be a fight.” Odell kept Crow at a trot to stay alongside Son.

  Son somberly shook his head and loped away from him to the front of their party. Odell threaded his way into the single-file column they made as they followed a narrow, switchback trail down the side of the canyon. A tiny, spring-fed stream trickled down the middle of the canyon, and a campfire was smoldering within a clump of mesquite along its bank. As they rode down a broad bench above the canyon floor, Odell noticed the ashes of many fires and the beaten circles were at l
east forty tepees had stood.

  The Prussian and his men arrived at the source of the smoke at the same time, and the entire force gathered at the edge of the mesquite trees. They sat their horses for a long time in silence and studied what the Comanches had left behind. The mutilated, naked bodies of two Mexican men lay like broken, bloated effigies of human beings. The smoke that had drawn the Tonks’ attention wasn’t from a campfire of the normal sort. The Comanches had built two little fires under the bound prisoners’ feet, and nothing was left of the bodies’ lower legs but charred flesh falling off the bone. There wasn’t one square inch from the dead men’s heads to their knees that wasn’t cut and hacked.

  Odell’s stomach threatened to empty itself, and he ducked his eyes away from the sight of the tortured corpses and leaned out of his saddle to retch. When he straightened up and willed himself to look again he noticed that none of the men on either side of him seemed to have noticed his weak moment, or at least they understood enough to act like they hadn’t.

  “There’s a cart back yonder in the thicket.” Son Ballard rode out of the mesquites and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “From the looks of things I’d say these men came out from Chouteau’s trading post up on the Canadian to hunt meat.”

  “It’s hard to tell what they were by looking at them,” the Prussian said.

  Odell had never heard anything truer. The blows from clubs and tomahawks had warped the skulls until the faces were hardly human. Both of them had been scalped and had suffered other things Odell hoped he would someday be able to forget. The rest of the Prussian’s little army stared at the dead men with tight faces, but Odell tried to keep his eyes averted.

  “Let that Injun-lovin’ Houston see this and then tell me about peace with the Comanches. Damned their black-hearted souls to hell,” Hatchet Murphy swore.

  “Damned Injuns,” Son said loudly to himself, and then remembered he was sitting his horse beside Placido. “No offense, old friend.”

  “None taken,” Placido said. “I’ve called you ‘damn white men’ plenty of times.”

  “It’s just two Mexicans.” The Prussian didn’t like the depressing turn their morale was taking.

  “I remember when we found old man Hazlewood and his son down on Walnut Creek. He and the boy had gotten caught without their rifles while out gathering honey. The Comanches nutted both of them and ran burning chunks of wood up their asses. I found the old man first, and he was still half alive and sitting there like a coon on a stump.” Son cleared his mind of the memory with a grunt and a shake of his head.

  “There ain’t no Hazlewoods left anymore. The Comanches killed them out last year when they got Jim and his family,” somebody said.

  “No, the Hazlewood men ain’t rubbed plumb out. I hear there’s another brother down at Seguin,” someone else at the back of the group offered.

  “There is, but the brother got his nuts crushed by a kicking mule and won’t be siring any more Hazlewoods,” another threw in.

  “What the hell is the matter with y’all?” Odell all but shouted at the men.

  He couldn’t sit by and hear such idle talk while the Mexicans’ bodies lay before him like bloody meat in a smokehouse. The memory of what the Comanches had done to his pappy was still fresh in his mind, and never again would he ever be able to swap lurid gossip about what the Indians supposedly did to their unfortunate victims. He slid from his horse and went to the closest body. He tried to avoid looking at the deceased’s accusing and tortured eyes while he cut him loose from the stakes that bound him. Before he knew it, most of the men were helping him free the bodies. All of them had grown even quieter than they had been when they first discovered the Mexicans.

  “Sorry, boy. Don’t think we’re taking this lightly. It’s just that talking foolishness can keep a man from losing his mind.” Hatchet Murphy’s one wild eye had grown wilder looking, and it was plain that he was reliving other such brutal scenes.

  “This ain’t an easy thing to look on,” Odell mumbled.

  “And it doesn’t get any easier with time,” Hatchet Murphy wiped a tear from his leathery cheek.

  Odell looked over to see the Prussian staring at him. The man was as calm and cool as he ever was. Odell already knew that the Prussian was a hard man and had even envied that trait at one time. But now he wasn’t so sure that he wanted to be like that, if it meant being able to look on such horrors without a trace of emotion. It seemed to him that a man would have to be half dead not be horrified and weakened by such violence.

  They buried the Mexican hunters in shallow graves, and led horses back and forth over them to pack the earth. Son Ballard recited the Twenty-third Psalm, or at least what he could remember of it, and then they mounted and started north once again. They rode silently out of that canyon, a funeral procession of violent men grown more violent from the mere passing of such a day.

  Odell couldn’t quit thinking about Red Wing as they rode. She may have been a Comanche by birth, but any people who could do such things to their fellow humans were capable of anything. It didn’t get spoken of much, but everyone in Texas knew what Comanches did to women captives. For all he knew she might already be suffering terrible things at their hands.

  “We have to save her,” Odell said to the Prussian when they were two miles away.

  “We will, Herr Odell. We will.” The Prussian kept his gaze straight ahead to where the Comanche trail headed into the distance. He looked as cold and hard as ever.

  Chapter 22

  Red Wing sat up and held the filthy, tattered hem of her long skirt in her hands and pulled a piece of grass from the tangle of her hair. She looked to the river and the commissioner nodded at her from where he stood at the edge of camp. She could tell by his posture and the look on his face that he meant his presence to comfort her, but she had to make herself rise and go far enough into the timber to be out of sight of the camp. She tried not to think about Jim Pockmark’s body lying somewhere downstream.

  She carried her valise to the river’s edge and knelt and bathed her face and hands and combed at her hair with her fingers. She washed until her skin felt smooth once again, but she still felt dirty. The muddy water offered a poor bath, but she stripped off and waded in anyway. She laid back and let her hair float and listened to the slow sound of the river echoing in her eardrums. She felt for a moment as if her spirit would float away on the gentle current, but the feeling passed.

  She dried her hair with the cleanest portion of her torn dress, and then took a fresh one from her valise. She felt better after her bath and change, but noticed there was still a slight quiver in her hands. The sun shone on the riverbank, and she stood there motionless with her hands upon her hips and looked out across the prairie while she soaked up the warmth. She told herself right then that she wasn’t going any farther. Her captors were going to have to tie her hand and foot to take her beyond camp. The stubborn strength that she had relied on for so long had been spent in her ordeal with the renegade Delaware, and she had come as far as she intended to go.

  The camp was well above the river, and the first thing she saw when she neared it was the commissioner standing in the same spot he had been earlier. She was going to tell him right then what she had decided, but something about the intense look on his face made her pause. He was focused on something to the southeast, and she turned to see what it was that had his attention.

  Two Indian braves sat their horses on the far bank staring at the camp. Captain Jones had come down to stand beside the commissioner, and they looked uneasy.

  “What are they?” The sun was in her eyes and she could barely make out the two warriors across the river.

  “I’m pretty sure they’re Comanches.” The commissioner gave her a strange, sad look.

  The Comanche braves eventually waded their horses across the river and stopped several yards in front of the Peace Commission. The commissioner
tried to grant them the hospitality of his camp, but the two refused the offer to dismount and eyed the white people with cautious disdain. It wasn’t apparent whether their intentions were peaceful or not, and they seemed as uncertain about the whole situation as the commissioner did.

  “Captain Jones, don’t you speak a little Spanish?” Commissioner Anderson asked.

  “I do,” the captain admitted reluctantly.

  “They don’t seem to speak any English, so try some of that Mex lingo on them. Tell them that we have come to talk with their chiefs.” The commissioner was trying to keep his rifle handy without appearing hostile to their visitors.

  Captain Jones rattled off a long explanation in halting Spanish. When he finally paused, one of the Comanches pointed up the river and said something.

  “He wants to know why there is a dead Delaware lying down there in the trees,” the captain said.

  “Tell him the truth,” the commissioner said.

  The captain spoke again, and then listened to the two Comanches’ reply. He turned back to the commissioner. “Their Spanish is almost as bad as mine, but they seem to think it’s funny that you shot Jim.”

  “Can they take us to their chiefs?” the commissioner asked.

  The captain shrugged and tried again. When he was through, the same Comanche who had asked about Jim’s body jerked his chin toward Red Wing and asked another question.

  “He wants to know if she is your woman,” the captain said.

  Red Wing studied the two Comanches from behind the barricade of saddles they had thrown up. Agent Torrey stood beside her nervously gripping his shotgun. It hadn’t been so long since she had lived among the tribe that she had forgotten such warriors. Everything about the two Comanches was familiar, from the naked brown bodies covered only in a breechcloth, to the long lances in their hands, and the haughty, cunning stares from behind their high cheekbones.

  The commissioner carefully avoided looking at her. “Tell them that she is a Comanche taken from them long ago, and that we have brought her back to her people as a token of our goodwill.”