"Nocona, Wanderer! Star Name, look!" Naduah dropped her bundle of wood and pointed. "He's back. Wanderer's back!" In her excitement, she left the wood lying and ran to meet him.
"My heart sings to see you again, my brother." Naduah looked up, staring at him, falling into the depths of his eyes. She had forgotten how big and luminous they were. He was twenty-one now, and the angles of his face were sharper, the planes more finely etched. There was nothing left of the boy he had been at times. Naduah was so happy to see him she wanted to laugh and skip. Instead, she walked beside Night, stroking his neck. He flicked his ears in greeting and whiffled softly to her.
"I'm glad to see you too." Wanderer stared at her in the way he always did. But she had learned not to flinch when his eyes roamed over her. He inspected everyone that way. At least everyone who counted with him, either for good or for bad. Naduah was glad she and Star Name had bathed at the river and washed each other's hair. She didn't feel like the urchin she had been two hours before. Star Name caught up and walked beside her sister.
"Will you stay long with us, Wanderer?" Star Name peered at him from around Naduah.
"I don't know. I heard about the treaty talks in San Antonio. And Buffalo Piss sent word for me to come. Spaniard and a few other men have come with me." Still he stared at Naduah, with the old, amused smile that wasn't a smile on his face. Finally she became embarrassed.
"You must have important things to do," she mumbled, dropping her eyes. "And I left my wood. I have to go back for it. Will you come to see Sunrise later?"
"Not for a while. There's much to talk about in council."
"Sunrise has been there for days. He only comes home to sleep." Naduah wanted to ask Wanderer if he had married, but she didn't dare. She had never discussed personal things with him. She'd go ask Deer. Deer would know. Naduah backed away and raised her hand slightly in salute. Then she and Star Name turned to go, walking slowly around the knots of busy people. Naduah forced herself not to look over her shoulder at him. She didn't want to see his back as he rode away, his thoughts only on war.
But Wanderer didn't ride away. He halted Night and watched Naduah, taking in the graceful, fluid way she moved. She's been studying Something Good, and now that gait is part of her. She was thirteen years old and three inches taller than Star Name, who was a year older. Naduah's skirt twitched as she walked, her thick, shiny, waist-length braids swinging in time to her stride. She might act like a child acting like an adult, but the woman inside her was beginning to show. Wanderer smiled a little as he squeezed his knees slightly and Night resumed his steady pace toward the council lodge. As he rode, sneaking to those who called out greetings, his thoughts weren't totally on war.
Wanderer studied the young faces ringing the council fire. It must be small consolation for Buffalo Piss to know he had been right. Treating with the white eyes, trading with them, always ended the same way. The People came away from every such encounter diminished in power. Every useful or pretty thing the white eyes brought had some terrible, unseen price on it. Never let a white man get closer than the point of your lance, he thought. And never stay around them longer than the time required to take their scalps.
They were so young, these new war leaders. And at twenty-six, with his ragged, tousled hair and eyebrows plucked smooth, Buffalo Piss looked younger than any of them. His skin was baby sleek and his features soft and full. He usually wore a fierce scowl to mask the feminine beauty of his big black eyes, and he was never very successful at it. But Wanderer had seen him on the war trail. He was one of the best, one of the few whose judgement Wanderer trusted.
Since he had come into the lodge that morning, nodding briefly to Buffalo Piss, Wanderer had sat silently in the humble position by the door. He was a northerner. A Quohadi. This was not his fight. He sympathized, but he knew he could offer little support from his people, the Antelopes. They felt it was best to stay as far from the whites as possible, only penetrating their settlements to raid. They struck fast and disappeared into the wild wastes of the Staked Plains. They had never been comfortable among the tumbled hills and groves of the Ito is, Timber People, as the Penateka were sometimes called.
Still, it was a magnificent plan that Buffalo Piss was proposing, something that had never been tried before. And Buffalo Piss might be just the man to bring it off. It would be something to see, and to be a part of. The council had Wanderer's total attention now. He studied each man in turn, sizing him up, trying to predict how he would react in battle. He had never seen many of the warriors before. And that made him uneasy. Buffalo Piss would have been much better off with the old leaders behind him. But if they hadn't been killed, this council and this plan wouldn't have been necessary.
Suddenly, overnight, important positions as civil and war leaders had become vacant. Wanderer could imagine the days spent recounting coups, the time in council as each band decided who would replace its dead chiefs. The likeliest candidates had been considered and one asked to serve in each position.
There wasn't much official about it. Being asked and being followed weren't the same at all. The People would follow the man chosen only as long as he made good decisions, only until his medicine failed him once too often, or another became more successful on the raid trail or the hunt. Then the old leader found that his opinions were no longer asked and his advice no longer needed.
Most of these men had been eager for the chance to lead. But now, under some solemn masks. Wanderer detected the strain of responsibility. He could understand that. In fact, he distrusted those that showed no strain. They didn't know the importance of what they were doing. Overconfidence was more dangerous than cowardice.
Responsibility for an entire band was something to assume with time and training. But to have it thrust on one, to wake up one morning knowing that hundreds of people were depending on one for the decisions that meant their survival, that was not a thing to take lightly.
After four days, the council was finally ending, as the pipe passed to each man in turn. If the man smoked, it meant he would go with Buffalo Piss. If he declined, he would stay behind. Pahayuca let the pipe pass without smoking. Wanderer couldn't see the relief on Buffalo Piss' face, but he knew it must be there. It would be hard to maintain one's position of authority with Pahayuca around. Many of the men in the lodge might not know Wanderer, except by reputation, but they all knew Pahayuca.
It must have been tempting for him to go along. But as usual, his judgement won out. Those of the Penateka who stayed behind would need leadership too. And if Pahayuca stayed, Medicine Woman and Sunrise and his family would too. That was good.
As the pipe came closer, Wanderer had still not made up his mind. He glanced up and caught the fleeting look in Buffalo Piss' eyes. The look was so fast only he could have seen it. And it decided him. He took the pipe and drew long on it. As he held it cradled in his hands, he made the briefest speech of the council.
"I am not a Penateka. I am a Quohadi. But my heart is here with my friends and family. Their enemies are my enemies. Now the Texans have taken the lands of the Honey Eaters. Someday they may even try to do the same to us. Buffalo Piss plans to stop them. He wants to kill them or drive them from our country forever and show them the might of the People. I will go and help in any way I can."
Buffalo Piss was declaring war on the Republic of Texas. He would need all the help he could get.
CHAPTER 31
Hundreds of shields and lance points glittered in the light of the full moon. As they moved through the night they were escorted by millions of fireflies that swarmed around them. The rough hills seemed alive and shifting with them, like schools of fish swirling in the water around a reef. There was a steady, eerie creaking of leather and the soft thud of thousands of hooves. There was the occasional slap of a quirt on a recalcitrant mule, and the nickers and the explosive whoof and mutter of horses blowing. There was the clatter of long poles being dragged across stones, and the dry crackle of brush against leather.
They had avoided that settlement. There were still many soldiers there. Buffalo Piss was heading for the more populated areas, the gulf coast and the defenseless towns there that had never felt the People's wrath. He wasn't going to waste all his effort and manpower on the small, outlying cabins strung along the frontier.
Ben McCulloch pushed his battered, sweat-soaked leather hat back on his head. It held his thick, chestnut hair out of his eyes while he squatted to get a better look at the tracks. He had been a Ranger for five years, but he had never seen anything like this. The trail was half a mile wide, and the ground looked as though an army had come through dragging plows behind it.
"Buffalo this far south?" Ben winced. John Ford was a good lawyer, a good doctor, surveyor, reporter, and politician. Someday he would be a good Ranger, but not yet. Ford caught the wince. "No. Of course they're not. Indians. Right?"
"Right." McCulloch studied the crushed blade of grass he had picked out of a hoofprint. "They're traveling at night, and they passed here about two days ago. If there are less than a thousand of them, I'll eat their horses."
"Maybe you'd best just offer to eat your hat, Ben. It's closer to hand and easier to salt," said Ford.
"If I saw that hat lying in a cow pasture, I'd step over it." William Wallace stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the trail. McCulloch and Ford were both six feet tall, but Wallace towered over them. Ford ignored him and went on peering at the blade of grass.
"How'd you know that? About them traveling at night and all?"
"They plowed through mesquite bushes instead of going around. And nothing goes through mesquite bushes if it can avoid them. Hell, armadillos go around them. And the grass is past the limp stage and getting dry. Feel it. Been in the print two days or so. Look at the insect trails crossing the print. They make those at night. So the prints have to be at least a day old."
"If you say so. But it beats me how you can know."
"You learn, John."
The lessons had been painful. And sometimes fatal. But the Rangers had learned a lot from John Coffee Hays in the past five years. And Jack Hays had learned from the Comanche. The Indians he hunted called him El Diablo, The Devil, but he hardly looked the part. He was five feet ten inches tall. He weighed one hundred and sixty pounds dripping wet and with his pockets full. He was dapper, with thick black hair and the long, dark lashes of a boy. He should have been a fop, a dandy, entertaining the ladies in their lace-curtained parlors on lazy Sunday afternoons. He should have been spending a remittance on slender cigars and elegant poker games.
He wasn't even a good shot. But he had a way of coolly calculating the odds and pulling off audacious maneuvers. Legends were already being told about him. One of his Apache scouts once said to a friend, "You, me, we ride into hell together. Captain Jack, he ride into hell alone."
Hays roamed the frontier, training men to follow him and to follow no one. He didn't create an army. He created hundreds of them, each composed of one man. His Rangers tracked the Indians ruthlessly, finding their camps by the languid wreaths of vultures and crows that hung over them. The Rangers were officially an arm of the Texas government, but neither Hays nor his captains wore insignia of rank. "Chicken fixings" was what they called gold braid, when they were being polite. Hays had trained Ben McCulloch as one of the first Rangers. And now Ben was one of the best.
Ben went on searching the ground, reading it for more information. "Comanche. Not that there was much doubt. Just wanted to make sure."
"And how do you know that?"
"Here's a track of the foot. Short and stubby. That's the way Comanche feet are, square as tobacco tins."
"You are a wonder."
"The wonder is that they got this far south with no one discovering them. I'd like to know who's leading them. He's brilliant." But already Ben's mind was churning over the next move. It would be suicidal to chase them and attack now. He had ten men with him. Even figuring the Comanche had their families with them, which they surely did. judging from the travois ruts, there must be at least five hundred braves. Ben knew his few men would be better deployed scattering through the countryside, rounding up recruits and warning people who might be in the Comanche's path.
My God. No wonder they've been so quiet lately. Every Comanche in the country must be with this mob. They've even brought their dogs. McCulloch would never have believed that the Comanche could have gotten this many people together for a raid. But for once, he was wrong. Entire bands of the People often had raided a thousand miles into Mexico before the whites came and provided easy pickings closer to home. Now they were on the march again, the largest force any chief of the People had ever led against the whites, an avenging army in a war of extermination. Ben could picture the devastation they would find as they followed the war party. War army. This was no party.
Well, best get on with it. He'd try to round up as many men as he could. And when he ran out of reinforcements, he'd attack with what he had. There was no choice, and he never considered not attacking. It was his job and his way of life. It was what the Republic of Texas paid him a dollar a day to do. When he was paid at all.
"Shit!"
Wallace and McCulloch and Ford and the three dozen men they'd gathered stood around the body. Those in the rear craned to see. The man had been shot and scalped, of course. They were used to seeing that. It was his feet they were staring at. The soles had been sliced off. From the torn and lacerated flesh it was clear that he had been forced to run a long way on the flayed surfaces. He'd probably been tied behind a horse.
"What kind of people would do a thing like that?"
"Comanche, John." There was a hint of exasperation in Wallace's voice. "If you'd studied Indians the way you study that Bible of yours, you'd not ask that question."
"You don't have to study them very hard," said McCulloch. "Just run across their handiwork now and then."
"We're going to be paying for the Council House stupidity a long time, aren't we, Ben?" Noah Smithwick came up to stand with them. Ben nodded and turned to him.
"You lived with them for three months, Noah. And you were at the council when the chiefs decided to meet with Lamar's gang. Who's left to lead this bunch?"
Smithwick mulled it over. "Well, there was Santa Ana and one dried-up old geezer, Old Owl, and a big, fat chief who probably couldn't find a horse to carry him. Pahayuca, I think his name is. The only other one was an ornery, snot-nosed kid. I don't know if one of them is in charge here or someone else altogether. Spirit Talker said there were bands not represented at his council."
"Save one bullet in your pistols," Ben called over his shoulder as he mounted his weary horse. He didn't have to say for whom they should save them. A few men started digging a hole for the body. They'd done a lot of digging and no fighting. Ben still didn't know who was responsible for this sweep to the sea, but he was going to find out. He had put the word out to catch a live prisoner if possible, so he could question him. He checked off the list of those killed in San Antonio. Who was left? It was a mystery that nagged at him.
Each day the Rangers gathered more men and buried more dead. The Comanche leader, whoever he was, had formed his army into a huge, thin crescent, a scythe that mowed everything in its path as it moved relentlessly toward the coast. The people of Victoria were lucky to have gotten off with only fifteen killed. The Indians could easily have massacred the whole town, if they had been more adaptable. That might be the key. As brilliant as that chief was, he was stuck in the traditional way of doing things. He'd tried the old surround maneuver on the town. The medicine ring, ridin
g in a circle around the victims, shouting and firing. It might work on a herd of buffalo, but stone walls didn't stampede.
At least he had made one mistake. And he was bound to make more. For one thing, his retinue was becoming unwieldy. They must have stolen a couple thousand horses and mules, five hundred from the Mexican traders in Victoria alone. Those, added to the ones they'd brought with them, meant a lot of forage. And a column that moved slowly.
They were headed for Linnville on the coast, and there was little to stop them from taking it. There were no fortifications or even strong buildings in which to make a stand. There were only the homes and warehouses for the port that fed San Antonio's appetite for gewgaws.
Buffalo Piss had led his army safely through the hill country and into the alien, swampy land of the coast. They had passed, hushed, through the gloomy tunnels of overarching live oaks hung with curtains of silvery-gray Spanish moss. The People had gathered the moss. The women would weave it into saddle pads, and the men would dry it as tinder for their pipes. They had all been scratching ever since as the tiny red bugs that nested in the moss crawled under their clothes and burrowed into their skin.
One of the dogs had been eaten by an alligator. Several people had come down with malaria and had to be sent back. But otherwise, they had traveled and raided unmolested. Not one man had been lost in battle.
As they neared the coast, the land flattened out and became veined with mangrove-lined rivers and tributaries. The live oaks dwindled in size and were punctuated with tall, spindly cabbage palms. The trees all leaned inland, twisted and sculpted by the prevailing winds from the gulf.
The low, flat land, the brushy scrub oak and palmettos, the sky and the distant town itself had a bleached, weathered look. The pale, gently curved shoreline lay along the blue water, the tiny waves licking at it lazily. Overhead the white August sun seemed to be trying to bleach everything to the same non-color. Even the people, Wanderer thought as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. He could feel the heat, like flames from a campfire, toasting his back. Only the waters of the gulf refused to fade. They sparkled a brilliant, blinding blue in contrast to the land and sky.
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