“If I wait, it also means hours more suffering for that poor woman,” Gannon went on.
“You drown,” the Comanche finally decided.
“Most likely. I have no idea where the underground stream goes, though there are several water holes scattered round the lowlands. The odds are pretty good they’re connected to this waterway in some way. ’Course, that might not help me. To fill a waterskin out there—they all require a long rope. Good thing is, you’d get my cloak. I couldn’t take that.”
Gannon undid the hemp-and-bird-bone clasp from around his neck. He realized, doing it, that there was something almost ritualistic about that, as if he were preparing for a baptism.
What do you want to be reborn as, Hank Gannon? he asked himself. His answer was honest enough, probably because he was tired and in pain: Myself, about a month ago.
Gannon dropped the cloak to lighten his weight. Then, taking a deep, steadying breath, he pushed off against his knees and rose slowly. He felt wobbly and went right back down on the cloak.
“Maybe you die before you even reach water,” Roving Wolf said. “Fall into horse.”
The Indian was enjoying this. That was part of the game, gloating over the fallen. To many tribes, the misfortune of a captive being used to create humor, laughter, was the highest form of insult. This was little different from the old prospector who worked for the blacksmith in Austin, a man who hadn’t been right at all since his capture by Kiowa. He was scarred all over his body, the result of being tied to a stake with a length of rope, surrounded by women with torches, and being burned as he darted this way or that. While he ran and screamed, the braves said things like, “We call you Little Sun” or “You smell like skunk soup.” The Kiowa only let him go because his pain and shame might frighten others from coming into their lands.
Gannon rested a moment on the cloak and then, with effort, got back to his knees and stood. This time he remained standing.
“I’m leaving, Roving Wolf,” he announced. “I have to help that girl.”
The Indian swung from his ledge, landing carefully on his feet. “You stay.”
“Let me go,” Gannon said. “I will come back, you have my word.”
The Indian slashed the air with his hand. “No. Strong enough to swim, strong enough to fight.”
Gannon looked from the Indian toward the wall of the valley. Without any further discussion he started toward the wall. His leg hurt at the knee, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from what he needed to do.
With a huff of annoyance—probably because he had to kill a weakened opponent, winning no honor—Roving Wolf came briskly toward Gannon. The white man turned to face him. The Indian did not crouch, did not intend to tackle his opponent; he did not make a fist. His intent was apparently to strangle the former officer. Gannon found that ironic.
The Comanche lunged with a single war cry, letting his brothers know that the battle was engaged. Gannon did the same, ducking to his right at the last moment as if he were a prizefighter ducking a roundhouse right. What Roving Wolf had not seen was what Gannon had done when he was on the ground, kneeling on his abandoned cloak. As a result, the Comanche was caught off-guard when Gannon straightened beside him and looped the length of dried deer tendon around his exposed throat. The duck-and-weave had cost Gannon some strength as pain shot up his side. But he was able to support himself on the back of the struggling native as he pulled the cord tight.
The Comanche bucked, reached back over his shoulders, dug his fingertips into his own throat. Failing to dislodge Gannon or the cord, he dropped to the ground to try and roll onto the man, arching his back and pounding down with his head, shoulders, buttocks—writhing, wriggling, kicking, moving any way he could to try and gain an advantage.
He failed.
All of that happened very quickly, as within a very short time the Comanche, gasping, lost consciousness. The red man was bleeding from the neck where the cord was still dug deep, his blood coating Gannon’s fingers warmly. He lay, a deadweight, on his attacker’s chest. Only then did Gannon realize that his own teeth were locked, his lips drawn back in a feral snarl, a guttural sound like that of a great cat rolling from his throat. He relaxed his face and, more cautiously, his grip.
The Indian was still breathing; that was how Gannon wanted it. He did not wish to kill his adversary. Not now and not this way. His left side and back hurting—that latter, more from having been bashed against the rocks by the struggling native—Gannon held the cord loosely in place as he rolled out from under Roving Wolf. He wanted to make sure he was truly insensible before letting go. He shifted his grip on the ends of the cord to one fist then used his free hand to claim the man’s knife. Only then did he finally let go.
Grunting in pain, Gannon started to drag the Comanche to the dead horse. He planned to use the cord to tie the man’s wrist to one hind leg, then removed the Indian’s belt to lash his other hand to the other leg. But pulling the man caused whatever was wrong with his side to get worse, so he just dropped him.
“I’ll prob’ly be dead before you come to,” Gannon said quietly, slowly working himself back to an upright position. “My consolation, Roving Wolf, is that your tribe will deny you my blood.”
He went back to his cloak and put it on, then used the dim moonlight to find his boots. He sat, struggling into them because of the effort it took to bend his sore back. But there was a girl out there who needed him, and whatever her agonies, they were worse than his.
Within just a few minutes he was on his feet and headed, half-stumbling, toward the mouth of the valley. Thanks to the war cry, the Indians would be expecting someone. Now that he was mobile, he had to figure out his own next move.
CHAPTER EIGHT
October 20, 1871
The quiet tension in the camp was palpable to Richard Calvin.
Standing at the northern fringe of the deployment, where the horses were tied to trees and stones, Captain Keel and Colonel Nightingale kept vigil on the men and geography. The sergeant was not far from where the two men stood, Nightingale in a cloak to keep out the night chill, Keel with a blanket over his shoulders. Neither man sat nor walked. They simply watched and listened.
Most of the men here were white, and every one of them had both the advantage and disadvantage of having been in exactly this same situation during the War—somewhere, in some battle, at some date. Then, they would have been five, six, seven years younger . . . and greener. They had experience now. Virtually every man here had also fought Indians during the interim. They knew that the red man did not think like a Union or Rebel foe, that Christian values such as mercy and forgiveness were foreign concepts. Captain Keel had spent considerable time with new recruits reminding them that the Indian was a new kind of adversary. Not just ruthless but clever . . . especially when desperate and cornered, as they were now, in Southern Texas.
But there is no choice, Sgt. Calvin reflected as he stood watching for movement anywhere along the valley. The expansion westward, perhaps southward, is inevitable.
Calvin did not understand why Washington did not push harder to expand the southern border. With so many former Confederates having fled there, with poverty so widespread and foreign investment needed, it would be a relatively bloodless move to put the Rio Grande behind them.
Then you could circle the Indian and, with the help of hungry Mexicans, form a southern army to push the hostiles from the south and east.
Well, neither President Johnson or now President Grant had asked him, to their discredit. It was a wise commander-in-chief who took advice from outside the circle of career officers who were by nature also politicians. They said what they knew the President wanted to hear.
About Reconstruction, too, he thought. A lot of the government agents, appointed and elected, did not grasp the difference between “fixing” and “paying back.” Calvin had always believed that if more leaders rode horses, they would know that give-and-take gets the best results.
“Identify
yourself !”
The cry was like a rifle shot from the western side of the camp. Everyone came instantly alert, like deer around an unprotected watering hole. Calvin turned and immediately began walking in that direction, peering into the near-black expanse. It was a solitary figure with a rifle—a figure increasingly familiar as he neared.
“Whitestraw!” Calvin called out.
The man raised his left arm. Calvin was immediately concerned not only because he was back prematurely, but he hadn’t signaled from atop the mesa.
The figure lowered his arm, did something that was lost in the darkness, and then—
There was a bang from his location and a cry behind Calvin. Keel went down. Nightingale began to move in response, reaching for his own sidearm, and then a second shot knocked him backward as well.
A fusillade from the western picket spun the intruder like a top and he flopped to the side.
“Everyone hold your positions and watch for others!” Calvin shouted, his own rifle shouldered as he scanned the west side, the valley, and then the eastern perimeter. “If it moves, kill it!” Only when he was sure that there was no immediate threat did he call for a medic and send a trio of skirmishers out to where the attacker had fallen.
Calvin was angry for a number of reasons, all of which came rushing into his head. First, they had stupidly grouped their leaders in a position that all but announced who they were. That left him now the ranking man out here, meaning this was suddenly his mission. Second, their classic deployment had allowed the resourceful enemy to swap one man for two—a bad trade; three men, when he added Whitestraw; more men, if either Keel or Nightingale had survived and had to be taken back to Austin. Finally, the Comanche had revealed a tactic that had been anticipated but not adequately prepared for: the willingness to advance with no hope of retreat or even of survival.
The sergeant had to fight the urge to launch a surprise of his own: to mount up and charge his men through the valley. In the dark, half of them would never make it due to the broken terrain between those sloping walls. Every man in uniform had heard of the disastrous British light cavalry charge against Russian forces seventeen years before, in the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. There was no room in the unforgiving American West for impulse.
It took a few minutes for the skirmishers to return with the body, two carrying, two covering the retreat. They brought it to Calvin, who knelt beside it. Other than three bullet holes in the chest, there was not a mark on Whitestraw’s clothing. No cuts, no blood. The Comanche had not wanted to do anything that might be noticed before he got close enough to accomplish his mission.
“Whitestraw was a good man,” one of the police officers remarked.
“We’ll commemorate when we can,” the sergeant said. “Strip this man,” he said, then rose and walked to where the medic was bent beside the two leaders. He had lit a lantern. There might yet be another Indian sharpshooter out there, but he was unconcerned with revealing his position.
“The colonel is gone, the captain—well, he’s fighting,” Dr. Zachary reported without looking up. The bespectacled medic was a veteran of two wars—the Texas Revolution and the Civil War. Calvin had always found him to be a skilled man and a straight talker. The arch in the sergeant’s nose was the result of an unset break; Zachary had determined, correctly, that it actually improved his breathing and his facial character.
The medic had cut away Keel’s vest and was busy probing a blood-pumping hole in his chest. The captain’s eyes were open and staring. They shifted to Calvin when he walked into the light.
“I . . . stay . . .” Keel wheezed.
“Quiet, sir,” Calvin said. “I ain’t gonna send you back. Can’t spare the men.”
Keel nodded once approvingly.
“Stay still, sir,” Dr. Zachary insisted.
“No!” the captain said. He used what little strength he had to push the doctor away.
Zachary frowned down at him. “Captain, you must let me—”
“Wait . . . please,” Keel implored.
The doctor stayed where he had been shoved, but his disapproving expression indicated that he would not remain there for long.
Keel’s eye sought Calvin. The sergeant squatted beside the officer.
“G—Gannon,” Keel said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I want . . . hearing. Fair . . . hearing. Reinstatement. . .”
The sergeant lay a hand on the man’s arm. “Yes, sir. I swear he will get one,” the man said.
“Officer . . . should look . . . after . . . his men.”
“You are, sir,” the sergeant assured him.
Calvin did not want to distract the medic further. He rose and went to see to the dead Indian. The corpse lay in the dirt, Whitestraw’s clothes piled in a heap beside it.
“What’re we doing, Sergeant?” one of the police officers asked, a Tejano named Hernando Garcia who came from Jalapa. Though he was only twenty, Garcia was descended from several generations of Mexican officers; his grandfather, Lopez, was a member of the surrendering delegation at the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848. His father Jesús had distinguished himself in the defense of the Constitutional government during the War of Reform.
“Wipe off that war paint on his chest,” Calvin ordered with open disgust. “The Comanche’ll have heard the shooting. They can count and they can time it out. They’ll figure he prob’ly got one of our people, else he wouldn’t’ve took the first shot. From our volley, they’ll know we got him.” He glared down at the dead man. “I want to return him without his paint. Let them know he wasn’t admitted into the presence of the Big Father.”
“We can do worse,” Garcia said.
“Tell me,” Calvin said.
The officer explained and, without hesitation, Calvin nodded approvingly.
The sergeant picked up the club that the man had tucked in the back of his belt. He snapped it over his knee, tossed it aside, and looked at one of the other men. “Pepper, find our smallest pony, bring ’im over.”
“That would be Little Link’s,” said the former army balloon operator.
“Good. Get it.”
“Yes, sir,” the police officer said.
Calvin then asked for a knife. Garcia gave him a laguiole pocketknife he carried in his vest pocket, a weapon with which he was inordinately skilled. The sergeant dropped beside the Indian. As he pulled the blade from its sheath, Calvin said, “However repugnant, it’s time we give the Comanche something to think about.”
* * *
It was not a long walk to the end of the valley, but it was a taxing one. Three times, Hank Gannon had to stop, lean against the rock wall he was closely following in the dark, and push his body back into an upright posture. Pain caused him to lean forward or to the side or to limp, depending on what started to ache.
What kept him moving were not the woman’s cries but the moans he could now hear the closer he came. They were almost constant, like the sound the wind makes past a window that doesn’t close quite right. There was no plan, as yet; he had to reconnoiter before he could conceive of a way to save her.
The mouth of the valley was like an earphone, magnifying sound as he went along. There was no sound from any of the braves. This wasn’t a ritual, a celebration; it was bait, and he knew it. They would be waiting to see who bit.
Gannon had to work to remain separate from the suffering of the woman. She was not far from where he was; from his earlier passage, he knew that the valley curved here, toward the east, after which it was a short walk to the lowlands. He was now hugging the valley wall, shielded from even the half-moon, using the absolute shadow to move forward. Gannon actually found himself thanking the pain for keeping him alert. He felt, heard, smelled, saw everything.
The nearer he came, Gannon noticed a very faint glow. The bait had been illuminated, not for the savages but for any potential rescue attempt. The victim would be visible, as would
the white men who sought to free her. All of them would then be slaughtered.
It was strange to be wrapped in animal skin, stalking at night. To track a man or hunt for food was different from taking on the personality of a predator. He found himself fully aware in a way he had not been at any time in his life—
The glow brightened as he neared the mouth of the valley. There was a cart, a small campfire burning on the other side so only its black outline was visible. As he had expected, the sound and the woman who made it were there. The back gate was down and he saw only a messy shape inside, between the center boards, part fabric, part leg, all blended together. The victim’s arms were lashed to the slatted sides of the cart, forming a V-shape. The moans came with every breath. The open back was facing him, the seat on the other side. The horse stood docilely in front, tethered to a tree. He was not surprised to see it there: if they were attacked, the Indians would want to be able to move their captive quickly.
Gannon froze as an Indian came to the side of the cart. The Comanche looked down at her and she cried out.
“No . . . no more . . . I beg you.”
The brave leaned his rifle against a cactus and came around to the back of the cart. Gannon sunk a little further into the rock. The man climbed in and shut the gate behind him before releasing the woman’s wrists. For a moment, the angle of the door, the illumination, revealed the lettering printed on the outside.
Breen Carpentry.
There was very little in Gannon’s stomach, but he felt it rise in his throat. He had to bite his arm to keep it in, to keep from screaming, both of which would have given his presence away. The one brave he might have taken; but more and Constance would be on her own.
Dear God, he thought. Christ Jesus.
Constance was not reckless, nor was she a pioneer woman. She would not have come out here simply for a ride. Rufus Long must have delivered his message, and she came searching for him. That was the only explanation. And with the Texas Special Police already out here, there would have been no one to come searching for her, save her parents. And they would not have known what Long told her; they would have had no idea where to go.
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