That was all different than this, waiting for you-did-not-know-what-or-when. He would have loved to be on the mesa with Whitestraw, picking off Comanche, but he would be more useful here if they attacked. That was the main reason he liked serving under Amos Keel. The captain commanded with a clear mind, not with emotion. Considering he only had one eye, his ability to see ahead was formidable.
“Like bobbing for apples.” That was how he had described one doomed Rebel charge through a canyon that was only slightly narrower than this valley. Pop, pop, pop—it wasn’t just the clustering of the men but the way their chests or heads went bright red each time he fired.
It was not long after the half-moon had risen, giving the lowlands a ghostly complexion, that all of the men came alert as one. It was a faint, distant cry that might have been a word, they could not be sure.
That word was, “No!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
October 20, 1871
Hank Gannon awoke in darkness and in thick silence. The latter was due almost entirely, he knew, to the cottony pressure inside his ears; whatever had gone off had done so with pounding force. The blast had not only knocked him off his feet, it had left him hard of hearing.
Those realizations did not come immediately but over the course of time it took him to become fully conscious. It wasn’t like waking up. His body came back well before his mind, which was simply a helpless, lost observer. He did not even realize, at first, that his eyes were open and he was looking up at black cliff and charcoal sky.
Where am I? Where was I? What was I doing?
Awareness and memory came back in fragments, shuffled together like a deck of cards.
Lying down . . . the valley . . . flowing water . . . ears throbbing . . . Indians . . .
And then the deck was whole and he remembered everything up to the explosion. No doubt caused—he realized now, stupidly—by lowering a lighted torch into a passage of water where odorless natural gases were no doubt also flowing.
He moved, but it came painfully—and it was then he realized he was not alone.
Roving Wolf was sitting beside him on the ground. His silhouette leaned over Gannon, dragging with it the distinctive scent of his animal-skin clothes. The Comanche held a waterskin and poured liquid into Gannon’s mouth. The white man drank in cat-like sips.
“Thank . . . you,” Gannon said.
Though the words sounded muffled, at least he heard them.
“Horse dead,” the Comanche said casually. “You caused.”
“Yes . . . I realize that.”
Gannon braced his soul as he tried to move his hands and feet. To his relief, he felt them all. To his dismay, he realized that he was in his stocking feet. The Indian had taken his boots.
“Horse save you,” the Indian went on. He made an up-and-down movement of his hand, which Gannon took to mean that the animal was between him and the blast. Now he remembered: he had stepped behind it to look up the cliff, watch for smoke from the embers. Now that he thought of it, he realized his head was resting on part of his saddle.
Though Gannon suspected he knew the answer, he asked anyway: “Why . . . why did you help me . . . Roving Wolf?”
“You save me, once,” the Comanche replied. “And cannot kill dead man.”
Gannon exhaled loudly. His back hurt, but he didn’t think he had cracked any ribs. The cape had apparently cushioned his landing.
“Where were you when it happened?” Gannon asked. He rotated his jaw, which did very little to clear the stuffing in his ears.
“Other side,” he said. “Long shadow.”
“Too many damn crags to see clearly,” Gannon said.
“You would not see . . . you did right.” He touched his own head. “Think.”
“Yeah,” Gannon laughed weakly. “I guess . . . I was too busy thinkin’ about you and not enough about gas.”
“Big Father put his wind there. Keep white men away.”
“Sensible and effective,” Gannon said. He shook his head. “But white men will not learn. We will still come.” He grabbed at the air, made a fist. “We are learning to trap the blood and breath of the Big Father.”
“Not you,” Roving Wolf observed. Gannon thought he detected a hint of mockery in the man’s voice. He held up a hem of the cloak. “You more like Comanche.”
“Lately, yes,” Gannon agreed.
The former police officer began to think about events beyond the valley. It was night, which meant the men from Austin should have been here hours ago; any battle should have been long over.
“What is happening out there?” he asked, cocking his head to one side.
“There is noise both sides,” Roving Wolf pointed left and right. Then he shook his head. “Know nothing else.”
“Your tribe is waiting for you,” Gannon said.
“Yes.”
“But they wouldn’t stop their war for that.”
“No.”
That meant either Keel and his people were defeated or had left. He did not smell the residue of gunpowder in the air, not even the faintest trace. During the War, fields of combat stank for more than a day. So there had not been a battle, at least not nearby. And they wouldn’t have gone home, leaving a war party less than a day’s ride from the city.
His thoughts were interrupted by a scream. It was a woman, speaking English.
“No!”
Gannon’s eyes shot toward Roving Wolf. As much as the white man could tell in the dark, the Indian seemed as surprised at the sound as he was.
“Your people have a prisoner . . . a hostage,” Gannon said.
Roving Wolf did not respond. Gannon pushed up on an elbow, felt his upper arm wobble, and collapsed. He tried again, and Roving Wolf pushed him down.
“Stay!”
Gannon swept the Indian’s hand away and grabbed the front of his fringed buckskin tunic. Roving Wolf pushed him back forcibly. Gannon reached up again, this time with just one hand. That was just a distraction; the other hand went to the Indian’s breechcloth where they typically wore their knives. He only got as far as the hilt before the brave wrestled him back down. Roving Wolf pulled the knife and put it to his patient’s throat.
“Stay!”
Gannon did as he was told, but only because if he died there might be no one to help the poor creature at the mouth of the canyon.
She screamed again, louder now.
“No! Please!”
Gannon pushed roughly at the Indian and simultaneously used his heels to scuttle back on the rock, away from the blade. Roving Wolf fell on the man, grabbing his hair with one hand and putting the knife blade back under his chin. This time he pressed hard enough to draw blood.
“Why won’t you let me go?” Gannon demanded.
“They give you, me,” he explained. “They not kill.”
Gannon understood. If he reached the Comanche camp, they could not molest him. Therefore, Roving Wolf could not permit him to go there. Not unless he was dead. Releasing him, Roving Wolf would be a “nonhuman,” something less than a creature, never again a Comanche.
Gannon’s only consolation was that whatever they were doing, they would do it for a while. The woman would have to endure. He steeled himself with what little comfort this afforded: the knowledge that no woman out here was a frail, paltry thing.
Besides, the struggle with Roving Wolf had turned him slightly, and looking around, he had an idea about how to get free of the brave.
* * *
It was like another world up here.
Andrew Whitestraw took a good while getting his bearings on top of the mesa. The occasional strong wind, the baking sun, and the gully-washer rainstorms all used this terrain as an anvil. Though there was barely any moonlight, he could see that the flat terrain was spotted with low cacti and a healthy array of stubby buckthorn and holly trees, many with exposed roots. He heard owls in the trees and mice on the ground and three times the two met in a flapping, squealing, bloody finish.
Howev
er, none of that was what preoccupied the scout. He was watching for movement that wasn’t animal or tree but human. There was no breeze to carry a scent, though the still air carried sound for quite some distance.
There had never been a time in his life when Whitestraw did not hate Comanche. From the time he was a boy, over thirty summers before, his people had been allied with the settlers of Texas against the Comanche. It was the only way to preserve the peace in their northern territories; too many years of hate between Comanche and Tonkawa made it impossible for there to be any other alliance.
Before moving out, Whitestraw considered what to do when he encountered a Comanche. He did not doubt that they had put an observer here when there was still daylight, and that the man was probably near. He would have been watching to see not when but how the white men broke their promise. There was no way they would leave a woman in Comanche hands; the distant cry he had heard was added inducement to draw them into the valley.
The scout was going to have to get from the outside of the formation to the chasm, to see how far the Comanche had penetrated. He decided to do that by going forward along the outer rim; it was less likely the observer would have been deployed there where there was little to see.
Unless his task is to wait for you, Whitestraw thought. He could not discount the canniness of the Comanche.
Despite the ancient rockfall, the edge of the mesa was solid. He would move ahead, stop, watch, and listen for movement to the east, then continue. Nearly two hundred yards lay between his position and the valley itself, and there were times when he had an unobstructed view of the terrain. A nighthawk twittered songfully on a large oak stump, having feasted on insects at sundown and calling predators away from its nest.
He heard movement to his left, toward the valley, and turned; he had just enough time to face the enemy before the Comanche had risen from behind the stump where he had lashed the nighthawk—a distraction to cause Whitestraw to dismiss the site as a hiding place. The bare-chested brave, dressed in the skins of a buck, leaped over the stump and ran at him with a stone-headed club, held well back over his head. Two things were impossible for Whitestraw. First, the enemy was too close to use the rifle. He dropped it at his feet and reached for his knife. Second, he did not know how lengthy the club was until the heavy, tapered stone came down against his right shoulder.
There was an ugly crack followed by numbness down to his fingertips, and the scout lost the use of that arm at once; he adjusted quickly, reaching across his waist with his left hand to grab his knife. Whitestraw swung the blade back in a slashing lateral cut as the Comanche’s arm was still moving down from the force of his attack. The knife cut his left bicep, digging deep, then continued across his chest. Whitestraw immediately turned the blade in his hand for a return cut, but the Comanche moved in, dropping the club and grabbing the wrist of the knife hand with powerful fingers. The men struggled for possession, but the Comanche had two good hands and used them both to wrest the knife free. Whitestraw immediately jumped back, his arm hanging uselessly, and turned to retrieve the rifle with his left. But the Comanche was on him, thrusting the blade up at his belly. The scout jumped back, fell over a rock, and fought to bring the rifle stock against his shoulder so he could fire.
The Comanche kicked the gun away before it could discharge, then dropped with both knees on the chest of the other man. He dropped the blade and put his hands around the throat of the scout. Leaning forward, he closed his fingers and Whitestraw gurgled. Because of the cut to his arm, the Comanche attack was not immediately effective. He adjusted his posture, sat on the man’s chest, leaned in with his good right arm, dug in with that hand. The Tonkawa native used his own good arm, his one fist, to pound at the rigid arm. But Whitestraw’s counterattack was unavailing. Blood and air had stopped circulating, and his mind and senses started to swirl. He stopped punching the Comanche, felt on the ground for a rock, a stick, anything to hit or poke against him.
The last thing Andrew Whitestraw heard before losing consciousness, and then his life, was the whistling of the nighthawk calling him to another world . . .
* * *
Angry at having permitted himself to be wounded by a scout—a Tonkawa scout—the fearless Wild Buck felt around for loose dirt to put on the wound. He scraped together a fistful, patted it into a paste, and gave it time to harden while he stripped the dead man.
It had felt good to choke his life from him. He was worse than a white man: he was a red man who had forsaken his own kind. His spirit could take comfort in the fact that soon he would be joined by the dogs he served.
Working quickly, Wild Buck donned the clothes of the dead man and pulled his hair into the same braids the man wore. The resemblance did not have to be exact in the dark, but it had to be close. He did not think there would be a signal of any kind: either gunfire or flame might attract unwanted attention. Perhaps the moonlight off the knife blade?
When he was finished, the Comanche picked up his club along with the dead man’s rifle and knife and made his way to the north.
* * *
The horse was beginning to smell.
Not bad, but it had been lying in the sun, its side torn open, for the hot afternoon hours. Vermin were starting to find it, crawling over and around Gannon to get to it. The Indian did not shoo them; he did not even seem aware of them. While he was up on the ledge, he had obviously noted a clutch of arrowwood and alyssum and had gone to gather the berries and flowers. He had offered some to Gannon, who declined. He had jerky in his cloak pocket and had that—which the Comanche declined.
Gannon had moved himself, tentatively, while Roving Wolf was gone. He was still in pain and wasn’t sure he could get up and away without the Indian tackling him.
The occasional cry from the woman gave him a deep stab of guilt. He had to get to her, and as soon as possible. Not that he knew what he would do, could do, when he got there. The Comanche had absconded with all the weapons. In the dark, he had no idea where.
He wanted to ask the Indian why it didn’t bother him, whatever torture they were inflicting. But there was no point. Comanche women and children had died as well, innocent victims of war. And Roving Wolf would not understand the evil of cruelty for its own sake. To the Comanche, to many Indians, the creation of suffering was a good thing. It unnerved an enemy—if not in the moment, then when word of the atrocity spread. And it enhanced the brave who asserted his virility, who undermined the superiority of the white man, who blighted the honor of their cherished women. Gannon understood it all. The police had been briefed on the primitive mind of the savage.
But it still knotted his gut and made him curse his inactivity. He knew he would not be able to wait until dawn, which would have been the sensible time to make his move.
Roving Wolf took a blanket from the dead horse and lay it on a seven-foot-high ledge where Gannon could not easily sneak up on him and split his head with a rock. The Comanche’s attitude toward the injured man puzzled Gannon until he realized that the sooner the white man moved the sooner the hunt could be resumed and the sooner the Indian would be able to return to the war party.
Gannon shifted onto his right side. The pain was sharp but manageable. His neck did not particularly want to hold up his head, but he hoped that just moving around would help. That’s how it was falling off a horse. If you could work the injury you’d be okay. If you couldn’t, you were damaged too bad for anything to help.
He rolled farther, onto his belly. The rocks were not a comfortable place to rest, so he got onto his hands and knees. Roving Wolf had to know what he was doing and was simply letting him do it.
Gannon could live with that, these Indians and their strange damned code of ethics. Better to heal an enemy before killing him, rather than working with the man to prevent hostilities. Then again, he remembered that private in the War—he couldn’t remember which battle it was, but it was loud, close-quarters, and terrifying—who deserted and was found a day later when Gannon was out lookin
g for spies. The boy was wounded in the taking, nursed to health, then put in front of a firing squad. Gannon didn’t suppose there was much difference.
He moved his arms, turned his torso this way and that, moved his head. Everything was working: painfully but working just the same. He saw the spot he needed to go. It was on the other side of the festering horse.
The scream came again, this time lingering as a sob.
“You not well yet,” Roving Wolf said.
Gannon looked over. He saw enough in the scant moonlight to know that the Indian had not moved.
“That doesn’t matter,” Gannon said. “I have to do something.”
“You go, I come after you. Better for you with rest. And daylight.”
For all his wisdom, it had not occurred to Roving Wolf that he was dealing with a night tracker. That strengthened Gannon’s resolve to depart.
He put his hands on his knees as he acclimated his body to the vertical. Injured sinew adjusted to what he was asking it to do. As he rested there, Gannon looked into the dark toward the opening he had inadvertently expanded.
“The water I saw in there was flowing north,” he said, “away from the Comanche encampment. And . . . if I judge right, it was no more than six or seven feet underground. Thing is, I have no idea how deep it is. What do you think about that, Roving Wolf ?”
The Indian did not answer.
“I’m thinkin’ if I go over and jump in, I could sure as hell break both legs and drown as I try to fight the current. But as I consider that, I have to admit those’re about the same odds I’d face in the morning tryin’ to get away from you.”
Still, the Indian said nothing.
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