“I don’t hear anything else,” Garcia said. “Perhaps he has not been captured.”
“True enough,” Calvin said. If the Indians had intended to draw them in, they would have begun carving him up immediately.
The sergeant was sick of seconding what one of his subordinates said. That was consensus, not leadership. But did leadership mean patience or muscle? He looked down. He did not want to feel the expectant stares of the men around him.
Are there policies or are there not policies? he asked himself. What is the point when the beaver puts one too many logs on the dam and it slides into the river? There are two, now maybe three, of our people out there . . . two men dead here, one gravely wounded. When do we fight back?
Calvin looked out at the valley. It was mute and impenetrable, like a wrestler he had once drunkenly challenged at a county fair. Because Calvin was big and strong, his men had expected him to go into the ring. So he paid his two dollars in the hope of winning twenty—and took a thumping.
This isn’t that, he told himself. It is your job to protect.
Calvin scarcely believed the words as they came from his mouth; it was as if he were simply a member of the unit listening to a command.
“Garcia, tell the men we are going to get our men and the lady.”
The Tejano threw off a salute and was about to pick his way from the dark when he stopped, turned to the valley.
There were hooves, faint and slow but out there nonetheless. And getting louder with each passing second. He heard them, then Calvin heard them, then the entire command heard them.
“Hold,” the sergeant told him.
The command was redundant. No one was moving.
The blackness continued to daunt them. Calvin began to feel shame at his own caution. Before too many seconds had passed, he drew his sidearm.
“Garcia, follow me,” he said as he started walking toward the valley.
“Sí,” the Tejano replied.
Calvin could tell the situation was serious. Garcia always went to Spanish when he was focused.
The ground beneath their boots seemed to crunch louder than before, magnified by their own attentiveness, the absolute stillness of the men, and the quieter, smaller hours of the night. Calvin almost envied the Comanche. They always knew where their people were, what they were doing. They could afford to kill anything that stirred, secure in the knowledge that it would not be one of their own people.
The last man was behind them now. They were in a funnel of larger rocks that had been punched from the mesa to make the valley on this end. They were still small enough to walk upon, not piled high; those were to the left and right, like the waters parted for Moses.
He could tell, now, that the hoofbeats belonged to a pair of horses. The sounds were from a narrow area not far ahead; they were either side by side or one behind the other. The sergeant crouched, raising his revolver and walking behind it. When they were almost at the entrance to the valley, when the walls loomed large and the camp seemed very far away, he half turned and whispered to Garcia to stay where he was. Calvin continued on, a few paces forward and to the west. If there was gunfire, he did not want them both falling at once.
The sergeant was just a few yards from the horses when the animals stopped, not in an orderly fashion but haphazardly as if one horse had stopped and the other walked into it.
“Is someone there?” a woman asked.
Calvin still believed that this might be some kind of subterfuge. The speaker was not on horseback; perhaps Indians were.
His heart throbbing against his chin, Calvin said, “Sgt. Calvin, Texas Special Police.”
Calvin half-expected those words to be his last. But there was no gunshot, no whoop, no charge with a tomahawk. Just the same voice saying, “I am Constance Breen.”
“It’s Officer Bosley,” said a young male voice behind her.
* * *
Roving Wolf retrieved the blanket-and-harness construct he had made and lowered it into the opening. Gannon used that and whatever crags he could find to pull himself from the water. It was an arduous and time-consuming ascent, the swim to the south, against the current, having taken whatever remnants of energy remained. His sides ached as if he’d tried to break a wild horse and been thrown repeatedly into the rails of the corral.
“Just let me . . . catch my breath, Roving Wolf,” Gannon said as he collapsed onto all fours. Even that caused him pain, and he rolled slowly onto his back.
“Our people fight soon,” the Indian said.
“No doubt,” Gannon replied.
“We join.”
That surprised the officer. He moved slowly onto an elbow and sought the shape of the Indian in the blackness. “You mean we fight with our men?”
“No. We wait.”
“For what?”
“End of battle.”
“My men will shoot you on sight,” Gannon said. “And yours will kill me.”
“They not see,” Roving Wolf told him. He swept his hands along the crags.
Gannon was not particularly interested in this conversation, but he needed to catch his breath and figure out how to move without hurting. Talking bought him time.
“I don’t understand,” Gannon told him. “Why not just do it now?”
“Need rest and strength of pony.” He pointed in the direction Constance had gone. “Only one warhorse. Other workhorse. Not equal.”
The Comanche made an interlocking gesture with his hands, suggesting that he wanted no advantage for either of them. It was a sign, to Gannon, that he was considered a worthy foe to be met on equal footing—both men on horseback, both men injured.
“You think you can sit out a fight between our people?” Gannon asked.
“If not, we both die. Need healing. Rest.”
“They’ll call you a coward, Roving Wolf.”
“I die in battle, they not say. I bring your head, they not say. Big Father revealed this.”
The Indian had a point, wherever it had come from. But Roving Wolf failed to grasp an important element: Gannon felt that he should be with the officers when they faced the Comanche, however much they were no longer “fellow” officers. He wasn’t as concerned about how Roving Wolf or any other attacking Comanche died, as long as they did so.
“I don’t very much like your plan,” Gannon said at last. He pushed off the ground to his knees. He winced and stiffened with pain; it took him a moment to say more. “Let’s finish this now, right here. Hand to hand.”
Roving Wolf stood over him. The Indian still held Bosley’s firearm, but Gannon did not think he would use it.
“You are same as all white men,” the Comanche said.
“For a man who talks to his ancestors, you have a short memory,” Gannon told him. “If what you just said were true, you would have died the day we met.”
“Honorably.”
“Honorably,” Gannon said. “Like what your party did to Constance.”
“What we did?” Roving Wolf said with what sounded like disbelief. “Your party hear her, leave her! They cowards!”
Gannon flinched as he thought of Constance’s suffering, and he had to restrain himself from digging his fingers into the man’s raw throat and claw out a fistful of flesh. To be so cavalier to suffering was not only uncivilized, it was the road to extinction for this creature and his people. Unlike the Indian, Gannon allowed his brain to trample down the animal thing his hands and soul had suddenly become. He breathed hard, huffing his outrage into the dirt and stone.
You are not a savage, Gannon reminded himself, though most of his body disagreed. Strangely, he thought of Captain Keel just then and the sandbar the commander had to walk between bitter men who had only known combat or slavery—often both—and the armchair fops in Washington or Austin who issued edicts tied with red tape; orders that Keel was somehow supposed to forge into reality. Gannon’s fingers relaxed as he forced himself to consider, What diplomacy would the captain attempt to wield here?
Like most Comanche, like most red men Gannon had met, Roving Wolf had a narrow view of the world. Maybe life was easier, better that way; Gannon didn’t know. There was no overthinking of tactics and results: you and your tribe either threw yourself at a problem or migrated somewhere else. Things were that simple. Rank was earned using the same yardstick for all, and leadership was hereditary or the result of a robust challenge. Gannon could not dispute that his own existence had been less perplexing and challenging since he’d been out here, away from politics and the demands of economy, away from the judgments and entitlement of colleagues and Constance’s family.
This was all too big for Gannon’s very tired mind and a body pinched everywhere with injury to contemplate. He replayed the red man’s last remark.
“You’re wrong, Roving Wolf,” Gannon said. “My people are not cowards. They will fight you.”
“For pay,” the Comanche held out an open palm, snatched it shut. “Go where told, not where heart is.” He slapped his closed fist on his chest. “During fight, many hide. Run. Not so our war chief, Buffalo Eyes.” Roving Wolf made a fist, closed it tight, brought it down. “He powerful, will crush you. We are warriors all the time. You, when you put on uniform.”
“That may be true,” Gannon agreed. “But there are many more of them than there are of you. If we both lost every man tonight, my people would still be ahead. You cannot afford those trades.”
“Cannot afford to lose lands,” Roving Wolf replied. “Many old and young die crossing mountain, desert. Better die facing enemy than run.”
“That is what the Indians of Mexico thought, of South America, of the Caribbean,” Gannon said. “They were all crushed. Forgotten.”
“Only by white man,” Roving Wolf said. “Not by the gods.”
That was the problem of trying to reason with Indians; they were not a practical people. Everything was a straight line, without nuance, utterly unchanged from ancient tradition to the present. But the exchange was not without some value. It reinforced Gannon’s understanding of the enemy and offered guidance to his own survival. And he knew—as Roving Wolf must—that neither man was going to change his way of life. The talk was simply a pause so that each man could find a weakness in the other, perhaps provoke him, possibly weaken him. It was an oral form of the kind of torture the Indians inflicted on captives.
Except that Gannon was not a captive and he had no intention of letting things go on like this.
Gannon thrust himself forward, one arm wrapping around the Indian’s waist, the other reaching for the gun. The Indian braced himself on legs made powerful by riding without a saddle. He stiffened his back, locked his arms, and Gannon had to put his shoulder into the Indian’s belly to budge him. With his free hand, Roving Wolf grabbed the back of Gannon’s hair and yanked back. The officer rose from his knees and, still gripping the man’s waist and arms, pushed into him. The Indian stumbled back and fell over the rocks but did not release his grip on Gannon’s hair. The white man landed on top of him, hurting his own arm, which was under the Indian, but jarring loose the grip on his hair. As their free hands fought for purchase somewhere, anywhere on the other man, their other hands struggled for control of the gun. Because Gannon was on top, he was able to let the man raise that arm from the rock, just a little, then apply his full weight and slam it back down. The blow to the Indian’s shoulder rippled along his arm to his hand—but the fingers were iron and refused to let go. And while Gannon grunted with effort and pain, the Indian made no sound.
The thought of Constance brought back the feral rage in Gannon’s arms and knees and even in his teeth. The Indian’s injured throat was exposed beneath the haphazard bandage and Gannon bit at it. Now the Indian made a sound, hissing with pain. Pinning the Comanche with his greater weight, Gannon wrapped both hands on the gun and drove it knuckles-down into stone. Then again. The fingers opened now and, his own fingers spidering through the dark, he wrenched the weapon free. Pushing back from the Indian, he got on his feet, nearly tumbled backward, but landed upright against the wall of the valley. Only blind luck put him on the north side of the opening instead of through it and back into the water.
Without looking back, Gannon turned and ran to the north. It wasn’t so much a run as a lope; he was too tired for more. The former officer listened for sounds of movement, heard none, and only now realized that there was warmth on his chin—dripping warmth. The Comanche’s blood.
You should have shot him, Gannon told himself.
But if he were to believe his own reflections on barbarity, that would have been the act of an uncivilized man. Even a man—especially a man—who had just tried to rip apart the throat of another had to try and recover his humanity.
Wheezing from the exertion of his flight, Gannon slowed, wavered, remained upright . . . and prayed he was alert enough so that if Keel’s men were coming in, he heard them before some nervous greenhorn shot him.
The fight had aggravated his injuries, and Gannon’s side began to hurt with every step. He knew he would not make it to the end of the valley without some kind of crutch to help support his weight, and there was no way to make one in the dark.
Believing that he had put enough distance between himself and Roving Wolf and suspecting that the brave would not follow him into the police encampment, he hobbled to a natural recess in the wall, snuggled himself into it with his gun hand in his lap, and waited for sunrise.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
October 22, 1871
The camp of the combined police and guard contingent was alive with whispered excitement at what they first thought was the rescue of the captive lady by one of their men.
The truth spread just as quickly, to mixed reaction.
As much for modesty as for warmth, Calvin threw a blanket around the woman’s shoulders. She apparently did not realize how much of her garment had been torn away. Both returnees were taken immediately to the ambulance wagon of Dr. Zachary. A comforting arm around her shoulder, the doctor had done his best to shield her view with his slight body as she climbed inside; nonetheless, Constance gasped slightly when she spied the well-known shape of Captain Keel on a stretcher on the ground.
“Risk comes with the uniform,” Zachary said quietly.
That was something he usually said to his patients, who were mostly men. Nonetheless, Constance seemed to understand. At least, he could feel her shoulders relax.
“Sergeant,” the doctor said, “get me more water—about a thumb. Use that bucket,” he added, nodding toward a hook on the back of the ambulance.
Calvin grabbed it. They had needed considerably more for Keel. He moved quickly to one of the three casks on the supply wagon.
Bosley waited outside as the medic attended to the woman after rolling down the canvas shades on the side.
The ambulance had been located behind a large rock, and the doctor risked lighting a single lantern. Zachary removed the blanket and set it aside. Lying on her back on the narrow cot, Constance shuddered and suddenly shot upright, trembling; that told Zachary what he needed to know. With gentle hands, he held her arms and said, “When you are ready, Miss Breen, I should see to your injury.”
The woman saw him look to her waist then back again. He knew.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“There is no need,” Zachary smiled in the dim orange glow. “Would a medicinal drink help?”
“Thank you, no,” she said. Then she laughed a little, nearly crying. “I—I pass out easily. I am . . . not . . .” she stopped. “My mother says I am . . . too much a lady.”
“And so you are,” Zachary reminded her.
Constance did not reply to that. She lay back again and when she appeared to have settled, the doctor removed his hands and retrieved a clear bottle. He splashed some on a sponge as he bent over his patient.
“This is bichloride of mercury—just for cleaning,” he told her. “It will feel a little damp, nothing more.”
“There . . . are there cuts
?”
“Don’t worry about what there are or aren’t, Miss Breen—Constance, if I may. Let me have a little check, all right?”
“Yes. Of course. Thank you.”
She started, not from the liquid but from the touch of the sponge, its slow, sweeping movement on her bare leg. She tried to think about Hank, about nothing else, and to pray silently for his safe delivery. What they had been through together, how he had protected her—
“Surely that will matter more,” she said aloud.
“Were you talking to me?” Zachary asked.
“No, I was just thinking,” she said.
The doctor got a clean sponge and dipped it into the bucket that Calvin had placed in the cart. When he returned and the water dribbled like running blood, Constance Breen screamed.
* * *
The men had removed themselves a respectful distance from the ambulance, but the scream carried like the cry of a hawk—raw, high, and angry. No one looked in that direction save for Sgt. Calvin, who was already facing that way. Bosley sat on a flat rock in front of him. He had not been given a blanket.
“By leaving your post you jeopardized the life of every man here,” Calvin said after delivering the bucket. “But you say you saved Gannon and the lady.”
“I fired a shot that ignited gas in the cavern,” Bosley said. “Without that, they’d have likely been slain by the braves.”
“And in the pursuit of that you failed to hear the approach of the other Comanche,” Calvin went on. “The one who has your gun.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Fully loaded?”
The officer nodded.
Calvin shifted, dipping a shoulder as he considered the wretched-looking man before him. The first hint of light in the sky showed his contours, nothing more.
“You saw no other Comanche,” Calvin asked.
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