Roving Wolf stood, wavering slightly with the suddenness of his move. As he slowly straightened, blood trickled down his chest and back. He waited for his head to stop swimming. Then, raising the arm tattooed with a knife, he pressed his palm to his breast, leaving a red impression of his hand, then drew himself onto the back of the pony. He had no weapon but his courage and his resolve that these riders would not pass.
Leaving Wild Buck as a sentry, Roving Wolf wheeled to take up a position deeper in the darkness.
* * *
Standing just yards apart, the men faced one another in the barely perceptible flutter of the orange flames from the camp. The fire was near death. The only sounds were the shallow breathing of the horses and the creep of the coyotes returning to their meal.
Roving Wolf walked the pony forward. His own chest was thrust proudly forward. Gannon saw the war mark before the light went out entirely. He did not know whether the blood of the palm print belonged to Roving Wolf or to Officer Ames; there was no question whose strings of blood were running over it, from the neck down to the waist.
Gannon drew his knife, stood between Constance and the Indian. “Where is the rider?” he demanded.
The Indian angrily thrust his chin beyond Gannon. The officer was confused.
“The dead Comanche—was on this mount?” Gannon asked.
“You know!”
“Not of this,” Gannon said.
“You—defiled my blood brother!”
“I did not. I would not,” Gannon said. “You did not kill the white rider?”
“Only Wild Buck rider!”
Gannon was beginning to see that the two of them—the three of them now—were caught in a proxy war between the two sides. A war within a war. If God had a plan the day He sent Gannon after Sketch Lively, the officer was unable to make sense of it.
Holding tight to the mane of the pony, Roving Wolf threw a leg over the back of the animal and dismounted. The Comanche wavered as he hit the ground. He released his handhold with care, steadying himself with his right palm. The men were just feet apart now.
“You are injured, Roving Wolf,” Gannon said. “Miss Breen is hurt. I’m—not so good m’self. It’s a few hours to dawn. We won’t fare so well in the dark, on these rocks. Shouldn’t try if we don’t have to. We know where there’s water, a blanket, a place to rest. Let’s—well, first, let’s call a truce so you an’ I can put some rocks on your fellow brave so the coyote don’t get him. They can eat the rotting horse. Then we will see to everyone’s injuries as best we can. You an’ I don’t need to settle things like this.” Gannon held up the knife in emphasis.
Roving Wolf was not afraid of the blade in the man’s hand, did not care about the disadvantage or about dying. Even if his body were mutilated, he would still be together with his brother.
This close to his enemy, Roving Wolf could smell the sweat of the white man. His stink was like a living venom, even under the stench of the smoke he carried from the fire. It was offensive to the red man’s nostrils, to his lungs, to the very air of this land. He wanted to rip skin from the invader, even though his own death should follow. Nothing mattered but to raise his arms in defense of his people and their home.
But the loss of blood continued, the haziness in Roving Wolf’s skull grew stronger, and soon the earth itself seemed to turn on end. He steadied himself against the animal. Sheathing his knife, Gannon came over and put his free arm across his shoulder.
Roving Wolf recoiled.
“Stop it, you savage!” Constance yelled from the horse. She wheeled the animal around so fast it startled Roving Wolf’s pony. The brave would have fallen if Gannon had not been supporting him. “God help me from sinking to your level! Everyone has disgraced his race this day, but you can begin to atone by helping each other!”
There was no further discussion. Still supporting the Comanche despite his own injuries, Gannon started toward the spot where Roving Wolf had left the disfigured brave. Collecting the pony, Constance followed.
* * *
Still on horseback, Constance was strangely, she would almost say dangerously, awake . . . alert. There was a feral quality to her thoughts, something rooted in survival, she suspected. She did not think about what had happened, only that seeking blood and revenge would take her down a road from which she would never return.
The young woman felt like an animal, dirty and abused and feeling nothing except what she needed to do to survive. Yet as the men worked together, weakly, piling stones on the dead man, she felt some of her humanity return. She had been used but she was alive. She at least had a chance to try and understand the indignity of what had been done to her. She would, she hoped, not be alone in that.
Unless your father blames you for what happened, she thought. In which case this night would have cost her a parent, as well.
When the burial was finished, the Comanche knelt, leaning on the rocks for support, and said a few words to the Big Father. Then, with Gannon’s help, the Indian walked to where the smell of the dead horse was noticeable but not yet oppressive. Another day in the sun and the carcass would make this part of the valley quite foul.
The air was cool and it was stirred slightly by the flow of the underground stream. Gannon sat Roving Wolf to the north of the opening, just south of the ledge where he had been resting a short while before.
“She will wash first,” Gannon said.
“No,” she replied. “Give me light.”
Gannon recovered his flint from the cloak that still rested on the girl’s shoulders. He struck it to a dry twig, shielded the glow with his body as he brought it near the Indian.
Constance removed the makeshift bandage and looked at the clean, fine slash. “You did this?” she asked Gannon.
“To get to you, yes.”
“What did you use?”
“Dried deer tendon.”
She rose and walked to the opening. It hurt to walk but she refused to cry out or show her discomfort to the Indian. Looking around, she saw the line that the Comanche had used to wet his neckerchief. She lowered the remains of the blanket into the water, dunked it several times, then hauled it up and carried it over. She knelt in front of the Indian and used an edge of the cover to dab at the cut.
This is not one of the men who attacked me . . .
“He should see a doctor,” Constance said.
“We have one at the encampment,” Gannon said, nodding toward the north.
The Indian shook his head once. As he did, blood surged onto the cloth.
“Sit still,” she ordered.
The Comanche stopped moving.
“This is not a wound we can bind tightly,” she said.
“Can we cauterize?” Gannon asked, still holding the burning ember.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Most of my patients have only had scraped knees. Where is the string you used to inflict this?”
“Back there,” Gannon said, indicating the horse.
“Get it. We must sew this wound. I have read of catgut being used for that purpose—deergut should do.”
“Don’t you need a needle of some kind?”
“I have pins,” she said vaguely.
Gannon jabbed the burning twig in the ground, picked up a few more, threw them around the small torch. He picked up one and walked back to find the thread. Locating it, he returned and handed it to Constance. In his absence, she had reached under her dress and removed a pin. Her ordeal had already caused the locking head to twist. She bent it back and forth until it broke away, then stuck the point through the makeshift thread. She briefly held the point in the fire so it would penetrate the flesh more easily. She tried not to consider whether it would cause more pain.
She leaned closer to the red man, his smell offending her, his proximity making her want to scream until she had no voice. But she could not give in to that or she knew she would never stop. Quickly deciding how close to make the stitches, she began sewing the wound shut.
The Indian flinched a little, then not again.
Standing there, holding the light, Gannon looked away from the bloody procedure toward the mouth of the valley.
“They not come,” Roving Wolf told him.
The man turned. “How can you be sure?”
“Men be target. Not you and woman.”
“Hold still, savage,” she said, which was as far as she would allow herself to go. “So now I am a woman,” she said. “Just minutes ago, I was like the dog or pig you torture to upset the children of settlers.”
“Yes,” he answered honestly.
She pushed the pin hard through the flap of skin. Roving Wolf yelped, seemed to want to strike her. Gannon moved toward him; the Comanche relaxed. Roving Wolf continued to sit there, very still. Constance resumed her ministrations.
“I have become what I beheld,” she said angrily. “I am like these animals. God help me, I do not want to be that.”
Gannon came closer. He wanted to put his arm around her but resisted. “It’s all right to be angry,” he said.
“Does it help?”
He shrugged. “It does, me.”
“It didn’t,” she said. “It made me feel even more shame.”
She finished wiping blood and the flood slowed. She did not reapply the original swatch of cloth but tore the sleeve from her blouse. It came away easily, tattered as it already was. She put it gently around his throat, bunching it slightly under the chin where the deepest wound was.
“More blood on my clothing,” she said to herself.
“Constance, don’t think back—”
“Back? Back? This is now, Hank. I bleed, I am bleeding. I hurt. I am afraid for what may come of this.”
“Whatever it is, I am with you,” Gannon said without equivocation.
Constance laughed mirthlessly. “You say that here, without the looks of townspeople, the disdain of my parents, the children who do not show up for class should the worst come to pass. Will you study the ABCs with little Running Blood?”
“Constance, please!” he said, stamping out the fire so he could move his body. He crouched beside her just as her face crumpled into a tearful wail.
“And if you die here, and I live?” she asked through her sobs. “What then?”
“We will leave at first light,” Gannon promised. “I will take you home.”
“Home,” she practically spat the word. “I lost that, too. Do you know what I thought—there?” she threw an arm in the direction of the valley mouth. “I thought . . . I almost laughed like a madwoman when I considered how all of this can be tracked back to a terrified black man who frightened a horse. An impulse, a moment!” she cried. “Something that had nothing to do with me!”
The woman fell onto Gannon and he held her gently. But his eyes were on Roving Wolf, who watched for a moment and then moved away, toward his ledge. He curled up under it, carefully holding the bandage in place with a hand. Gannon did not believe he was being insensitive, but respectful. He had to know his presence could in no way lessen the woman’s pain.
Gannon did not know for how long they stayed bound and bonded, but the fire had died and the stars had come out in all their brilliance and his own eyes shut in welcome snatches of sleep . . .
CHAPTER TEN
October 20, 1871
“Either the girl’s dead or she’s safe,” Garcia said to the two men standing across from him.
The Tejano and Officer Aloysius Pepper stood with Sgt. Calvin, who had a rock in his palm, running his fingertips across it, looking at the faint yellow-orange glow that gilt the top of the mesa. It was followed by the distant pops of gunfire. The camp came instantly alert.
“That fire says that someone tried, anyway,” Pepper said.
“Do you think it could be Gannon?” asked Garcia.
“It was his lady out there,” Calvin said.
Garcia shifted uneasily. “Sarge, he may need help.”
“We’re out here for Austin, not Officer Gannon,” he said. “Where we are is a defensible position. We start peeling men off—”
“We bring Gannon here, we are back up a man,” Garcia said.
Calvin’s mouth twisted. There was no disputing that logic—assuming it was Gannon and he had survived, uninjured. One was likely, the other less so.
“If it is Gannon, he’ll make his way here,” Calvin said. “We hold our positions for now.”
The decision sat in the sergeant’s gut like warm, flat ale. Command filled him with nothing he wanted inside: caution and an outward impression of cowardice, for one. A divided sense of loyalty, for another—the good of many men versus the needs of one. And there was a new one he really did not like: what would Keel do? Calvin could defend staying put, if Keel or someone higher up asked. He could not defend risking a man or two on the same kind of reconnoitering that had cost them Whitestraw and, as a result, Nightingale and possibly Captain Keel.
There is nothing good about this, nothing at all, Calvin thought. Not if you want to continue being a man and having a clear sense of right and wrong.
As the men watched, the rainbow of fire quieted and finally vanished. There had been no sounds after the initial shooting. The quiet around the valley suddenly seemed deeper than before.
“The night varmints have all left,” Pepper observed.
“They’re smarter than people,” Garcia observed. “That’ll make it tough for Injuns to signal by imitating ’em.”
Calvin had just been considering that same point. A people who built their lives and culture in and around the land lived and died with that land. It was why they were fighting so hard for the Comancheria.
Problem for them is, no people on this continent love their land more than Texicans, he thought. Even misguided agents of federal policy could not change that.
The men listened for something to break the silence, other than their own breathing. Smoking had been forbidden, and some of those breaths were fast, anxious. Chewing tobacco was all that was allowed, but the men had gone through those supplies early in the evening.
“If they’d caught him alive, there’d be a party,” Pepper suggested. His voice seemed to carry for a mile.
“I wonder if Gannon killed Miss Breen,” Garcia said solemnly. “Maybe those were the shots we heard. If it was me, that’s what I’d’ve done. Just came up and shot her.”
“Then himself, mebbe,” Pepper said.
“Awright, button it,” Calvin ordered. On top of everything else, he was the last one to see them together before sending Gannon on his mission. That picture of them, together and happy, was not something he cared to contemplate now. It made him think of his own eldest sister, Susannah, writing to him about the death of her newly minted husband early in the war. West Point Lt. Cornelius Taylor of the 3rd Infantry Regiment had fallen outside of Big Bethel, just two months into the conflict, thrown by his horse and breaking his neck.
“War to me is needless,” she had written, “but this death is so much more a waste . . .”
Her brother did not agree with Susannah about war, though he had not written her so in her grief. But of all the events of life that had seemed designed to confound and conspire, none was quite so maddening as this. Calvin was not a particularly religious man—people assumed from his name that he must be—but times like these, when random events triggered such deep pain, made him believe even less.
And yet . . . Calvin thought.
On nights like these, when the world was still and even the agents of carnivorous death were in hiding, and the atmosphere seemed ripe with the presence of the Devil himself, he had to wonder whether God or Satan had been responsible for the suffering of Hank Gannon. Had that officer, or his lady, or someone close to his lady, done something for which penance must be exacted?
Calvin did not know and he did not want to think of it too deeply. Doing so, he would inevitably go through the catalogue of his own life and create a ledger of the good and the bad and deeds for which he had not yet answered. T
he war—there had been so much in that for which his only justification was that he had been obliged to follow orders. The one misery in particular that stuck like a burr in his soul was shooting a scout who turned out to be a lost deserter, no more than a boy, who was trying to get home to his mama. Lying on his back, alone in a thicket, spitting blood, he talked to her as if he were in his bed at home in Georgia. If Calvin had known he was a frightened lad, shorter than the rifle he carried, he would not have shot him.
Yet allowing a Rebel to pass? Which would have been the greater sin?
The medic felt his way through the dark to Calvin’s side.
“Captain Keel is asking for you,” he reported.
Calvin dropped the stone, picked up his rifle, and followed Dr. Zachary to the rear of the encampment.
* * *
For Captain Amos Keel, the worst part of being incapacitated was that he was conscious. Even when his one good eye was closed, even when pain snapped it open before the doctor heard his moans and plied him with laudanum, his mind was awake.
Now it was thinking about tactics, by default. His professional life kept other worries away—such as having no children and a wife who had taken to Jesus Christ to fill the absence. Then it was thinking about his wife, who he worried about when he was away.
Then it was very specifically taking stock of a fateful conversation he had had with Governor Davis just a month before, about the function of the military garrison in Austin. Until the Blanco Canyon offensive, the army had been used mostly for elections, when they were sometimes required to keep order. They were also used for quieting the occasional uproar over a Reconstruction mandate that went against the nature of the Texas natives and Southern transplants. Primarily, the military contributed its skills and personnel to agricultural, mechanical, and construction endeavors.
Four weeks earlier, Captain Keel was enjoying his monthly lunch with the governor when Keel broached the subject of asking for troops from other states to man the Austin barracks while the main force remained well west.
“That is where they are needed,” Davis had told him. “You will be reinforced by the State Guard only if it becomes necessary.”
War Valley Page 14