Текст книги "Dead Man's Walk"

Автор книги: Larry McMurtry

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

The clouds had broken, while Call was struggling under water— the sunlight when he broke the surface, bright sunlight on the foam-flecked water, with the deep blue sky above, was the most welcome sight he had ever seen.

“Don’t try to swim, just let me drag you,” a voice said. “I believe I can get you to the shallows if you’ll just keep still, but if you struggle we’ll likely both go under.”

Call was able to determine that his rescuer was the tall boy from Arkansas, Jimmy Tweed. Unlike the rest of the Rangers, Jimmy had declined to dismount and cross the river holding on to his horse’s tail. He was still in the saddle, which was mostly submerged. But his horse was a stout black mare, and she kept swimming, even though not much more than her nose and her ears were above the stream.

Jimmy Tweed had reached into the river and grabbed Call’s shirt collar, which he gripped tightly. Call managed to get a hand into the black mare’s mane, after which he felt a little more secure.

“Watch out for dead mules—there’s apt to be Comanches with ‘em,” Call informed him. Jimmy Tweed seemed as calm as if he were sitting in church.

“I seen you shoot that one,” Jimmy said. “Hit him in the neck. I’d say it was a fine shot, being as you was in the water and about to drown.”

Just then something hit the water, not far from Call’s shoulder, with a sound like spitting. They were not far from the east bank, then—Call looked and saw puffs of smoke from a stand of trees just above the river.

“They’re shooting!” he said—another bullet had sliced the water nearby. “You oughtn’t to be sitting up so tall in the saddle—you make too good a target.”

“I guess I’d rather be shot than drownt,” Jimmy Tweed said. “If there’s one thing I’ve never liked it’s getting water up my nose.”

In another moment, Call felt his feet touch bottom. The water was still up to his chin, but he felt a little more confident and told Jimmy that he could let go his grip. Just as Jimmy let go, Call saw a Ranger fall. One of the new men had just made it to shore and was wading through the mud when a bullet knocked him backwards.

“Why, tiiat be Bert,” Jimmy Tweed said, in mild surprise. “He sure didn’t pick much of a place to land.”

“We can’t land here, they’ll shoot us like squirrels,” Call said. “Slide off now, and turn the horse.”

“I expect Bert is dead,” Jimmy said calmly—the fact was confirmed a moment later when two Comanches ran down the muddy riverbank and quickly took his scalp.

Call managed to point the black horse downstream—he was able to feel his way behind him, clinging to saddle strings and then to the horse’s tail, until he had the black horse between him and the riverbank. With only a bit of his head showing, he didn’t figure a Comanche marksman would be very likely to hit him. Jimmy Tweed, though, flatly refused to slide off into the water.

“Nope, I prefer to risk it in the saddle,” he said, though he did consent to lean low over the black horse’s neck.

They heard fire from the near bank and saw that Shadrach, Bigfoot, and Blackie Slidell had made it across and taken cover behind a jumble of driftwood. Call looked up and saw what looked like a muskrat in the water, not far from where the Rangers were forting up. On closer inspection the muskrat turned out to be the fur cap procured by Long Bill Coleman before he left San Antonio. Long Bill was underneath the cap. He was walking slowly out of the river, though the water was still up to his Adam’s apple. There was no sign of the horse he had tried to cross the Brazos River on.

By the time Call and Jimmy Tweed struggled out of the water and took cover behind the driftwood, the firing had stopped. Bigfoot had walked downstream a few yards, in order to pull a body out of the water. Call supposed a Ranger had been shot but was surprised to see that the body Bigfoot pulled out of the Brazos was the Comanche boy he himself had shot. Several more Rangers began to struggle out of the flood, some of them clinging to the bridle reins or tails of their mounts. Others were without horses, having lost hold of their mounts during the swim.

“Well, you got him,” Bigfoot said, looking at Call. “I forgot to tell you to look out for dead animals—Comanches will use them for floats.“Call was surprised at how young the boy looked. He could have been no more than twelve.

“You’re lucky your gun fired,” Shadrach said. “Them old muskets will usually just snap on you, once they get wet.”

Call didn’t say anything. He knew he had been lucky—another second and the dead boy would have had a knife in him. He could remember the boy’s eyes, staring at him from between the legs of the dead mule.

He didn’t want to look at the corpse, though—he turned to walk away and noticed that both Shadrach and Bigfoot were looking at him curiously. Call stopped, puzzled—their looks suggested that he had neglected something.

“Ain’t you going to scalp him?” Bigfoot asked. “You killed him. It’s your scalp.”

Call was startled. It had never occurred to him to scalp the Comanche boy. He was a young boy. Although he was glad that he had escaped death himself, he felt no pride in the act he had just committed—the boy had been daring, in his view, to float down a swollen river, armed only with a knife, clinging to a dead mule in hopes of surprising and killing an armed Ranger. The reward for his bravery had been a bullet wound that nearly tore his head off. He would never ride the prairies again, or raid farms. Although he had had to kill him, Call thought the boy’s bravery deserved better than what it had got him. There would be no time to bury the boy, anyway—the thought of cutting his hair off did not appeal.

“No, I don’t want to scalp him,” Call said.

“He would have scalped you, if he could have,” Bigfoot said.

“I don’t doubt it,” Call said. “Scalping’s the Indian way. It ain’t my way.”

“It’ll be your way when you’re a year or two older, boy—if you survive,” Shadrach said. Then he casually knelt by the Comanche boy and took his scalp. When he finished, he pulled the boy well back into the current and let him float away.

“I should have buried him—I killed him,” Call said.

“No, you don’t bury Indians,” Bigfoot informed him. “They gather up their own dead, when they can. I guess Shad wants to make them work at it, this time.”

Shadrach had just turned and started back toward the shore, when they heard a scream from far down the river.

“Oh Lord, it’s Rip—he went downstream too far,” Long Bill said. “I believe he’s bogged.”

“Puny horse,” Bigfoot commented, raising his rifle. Rip’s horse seemed to be bogged, some twenty yards out into the stream. Five Comanches, screaming their wild cries, raced out of the scrub oak toward the river. Bigfoot shot and so did Shadrach, but the range was long and both missed. Just then a rain squall passed over them, making it hard to see well enough to shoot accurately at such distances. Rip screamed again and flailed at his horse, but his horse was too weak from his long swim to pull out of the thick river mud. The first Comanche had already splashed into the edge of the river. Call had reloaded his musket—he took careful aim and thought he hit the first Comanche, but the hit was not solid enough to slow the man. They saw Rip raise his rifle and fire point-blank at the first Comanche, but the gun misfired and in a second the Indians swarmed over him. His final scream was cut short. Before Call could get off another shot, Rip Green was hacked to death and scalped. His body was soon floating down the same river as that of the Indian boy.

Several Rangers shot at the Indians who killed Rip, but none of the shots had any effect. Bigfoot and Shadrach, concluding that the range was hopeless, didn’t shoot.

“It don’t pay to be a poor judge of horseflesh, not in this country,” Bigfoot observed. “He ought never to have tried the river on that nag, not with the river running this high.”

“What could he do? He couldn’t just sit over there and watch,” Call said. Rip Green had gone into the water just as he did—it was just Rip’s bad luck to float downstream, out of the range of help.

“Well, he could have let the horse go and swum out, like me,” Long Bill said. “I reckon I’m a better swimmer than I thought I was. My pony gave out when we was right in the middle, but here I am.

“If you don’t hunker down you won’t need to swim no more rivers—you’ll be floating down this one, dead,” Bigfoot said. Bullets began to hit the water all around them—the Rangers were forced to huddle together in the shelter of a small patch of driftwood. No men were hit, though—probably the driving rain threw off the Comanche marksmen. Call watched the trees above them as closely as he could, but he was unable to glimpse a single Indian—just puffs of smoke from their guns. The shots were coming from a semicircle of woods above them.

“There’s too many of them, Shad,” Bigfoot concluded. “They had a party waiting, I expect.”

Call tried to get a sense of how many Indians they faced by counting the shots—but he knew the method wasn’t accurate. After all, the Indians were hidden. They could move around at will, shooting from one part of the woods and then another.

When the Rangers counted heads they discovered that they were down to eleven men, four less than they had started across the river with. Rip was dead, and so was the man named Bert—the whereabouts of the other two could not be ascertained.

“Probably drowned—I nearly did,” Long Bill said.

“No, probably deserted,” Shadrach said. “One is that fellow from Cincinnati. I don’t think he had much stomach.”

All that could be remembered about the other missing man was that he had ridden a roan horse. No roan horses were visible among the horses, though Long Bill’s horse and two others were also unaccounted for.

Call supposed the Comanches would charge any minute. He kept his gun as dry as he could and got ready to shoot accurately, when the charge came. Once again he found himself questioning the competence of the Rangers—here they were, huddled behind a few trees, four men and three horses short of what they had started out with, facing a Comanche force that had so far been invisible, commanding the woods above them. Behind them was the churning, flooding Brazos River. Their retreat would be watery, if they had to make one. Only those whose horses were good swimmers would have much of a chance.

But the day passed with no charge. From time to time the skies cleared and the sun shone; then clouds would pour over the western hills, and squalls would wet them once again, just when they had begun to hope of being dry. Shadrach and Bigfoot had long since decided that a retreat back across the river was their best chance— Shadrach thought there might be as many as thirty warriors opposing them, more than they could reasonably hope to whip.

A retreat in daylight, though, would be suicidal. The minute the Comanches saw them turn into the river, they would swarm down the shore like hornets and pick them off.

“We’ll wait,” Bigfoot said. “That’s the hard part of Indian fighting. Waiting. You never know what those red boys are doing. They may be up there cooking a coon or a possum, or they may be sneaking up. Try not to let your eyes get tired. It’s when your eyes get tired that your scalp’s in the worst danger.”

Call didn’t know how you were supposed to avoid the danger of tired eyes, when the Comanches were so clever at hiding. Who would think to look for an Indian boy between the legs of a floating mule?

The day passed very slowly. Though several Rangers speculated that the river would soon begin to fall, it didn’t. Clouds continued to roll through—Call thought the muddy flood looked higher, not lower. He was dreading the crossing—it had been bad in daylight, and would be even worse in darkness. He was not the only one worrying, either. Long Bill, despite his successful swim that morning, was once again doubtful that he could survive in the water if he had to navigate more than ten yards.

While the dusk gathered and the tops of the hills darkened, the Rangers debated whether it was better to hold the horse’s mane or the horse’s tail, the saddle strings, a stirrup, or even a saddle horn. Call didn’t enter the debate—his concern was to keep his musket in firing order—but he thought that if he clung to a stirrup he might be better able to keep his gun across the saddle, where it ought to stay fairly dry…

In the midst of the talk, with Shadrach and Bigfoot squatting at the edge of the driftwood, watching the woods, a man standing just beside Call—he was one of the new men—suddenly jerked, lurched forward, and fell facedown in the water, an arrow right between his shoulders. Call brought his gun up and whirled to face the darkening water. He saw a floating log, and just above it, for a second, the curve of a great wet hump; it might have been a huge fish diving, but Call knew it was Buffalo Hump behind the log. He fired immediately, and a chip of wood flew off the log; then several of the Rangers fired, but to no avail. The current swept the log downstream into the deep dusk, and there was no more sign of the Comanche chief.

Longen, the man who had fallen, was not yet dead—he was jerking and flapping in the water, like a fish that had been speared but not killed.

Bigfoot, annoyed to have been slipped up on so easily, waded several steps into the river, as if he meant to swim after the log and engage the Comanche, but Shadrach yelled at him to come back. “Come back here,” he said. “Don’t be trying no ignorant fighting.

Bigfoot hesitated a minute—he wanted to go—but the floating log was barely visible, in the dusk. If he tried to swim for it, Buffalo Hump might slip into the shallows and fill him with arrows while he swam. He knew it was folly to try it, but his fighting blood was up— it was all he could do to check himself; but he did check himself. Crouching low, he waded back to the little group of Rangers by the stand of driftwood.

“Dern, I hate to let him come at us like that,” he said. “The goddamn devil! He took Josh and took Zeke and now he’s taken this tall fellow here.”

All the Rangers stood around uneasily as the tall man named Longen continued to jerk and flop. They pulled him up on the muddy, darkening shore, but no one had any remedy for the fact that the man had an arrow lodged in his backbone. He flopped and jerked, but made no sound at all. Shadrach made one attempt to pull the arrow out, but couldn’t budge it.

“I guess we could tie him on a horse,” Bigfoot speculated. “Maybe if we can get him across the river he’ll live till we can get him to a doc.”

“No, let him die,” Shadrach said. “His lights are nearly out.”

A moment later the man named Longen—no one could remember his first name—ceased to flop. Shadrach felt his neck, and pronounced him dead.

“Get his possibles, boys,” Shadrach said, addressing Call.

Call had no idea what the old mountain man was talking about. What were possibles?

“He means empty his pockets—take his gun and his ammunition,” Bigfoot informed him. “Don’t leave a thing on him that might help the red boys. They don’t need no help—they got five of us with no assistance, it looks like.”

The last light faded soon after that. Now and again the clouds would break, bringing a glimpse of faint stars, or a thin moon. Call got every item of use off the dead man: his guns, his bullets, tobacco, a knife, a few coins. The knife was a good one—Call meant to keep it for Gus, who had no knife, and had long envied him the one old Jesus had made him.

“It’s dark enough—I expect it’s time to swim,” Bigfoot said.

“Dern it, I hope there ain’t no red boys out there, floating around on logs or dead mules,” Long Bill said. “My eyesight’s poorly, in this kind of weather.”

Call wedged Longen’s gun beneath his girth, and led the little bay back into the river. The horse had more confidence crossing back. He took the water easily and swam well. Bigfoot and Shadrach were ahead. Jimmy Tweed, true to his convictions, refused to leave the saddle. Long Bill and Blackie Slidell were right behind Call. Blackie Slidell’s horse proved to be a frantic swimmer. He swam past Call, so close that Call’s bay was pushed off course and floundered for a moment. Call was irritated, but it was so dark he couldn’t even see Blackie. When he opened his mouth to say something he got water in it and nearly choked. He tried to keep an eye out for floating logs or floating mules, but it was so dark he couldn’t see upriver at all. He concentrated on keeping his musket securely across his saddle. When his feet finally touched bottom and he and the little bay struggled out of the water, a lucky feeling came over him. The river hadn’t killed him, and neither had the Comanches. He was tired, and supposed they would be stopping, but he was wrong. Shadrach and Bigfoot led them through the hills all night, toward the big encampment on Bushy Creek.

AN HOUR AFTER HE arrived in the big camp, to his surprise and embarrassment, Woodrow Call was made a corporal in the Texas Rangers. The Ranger troop rode in, five men short, and Bigfoot made a hasty report to Colonel Cobb, who sat outside his tent, smoking a big cigar and scratching the head of a large Irish dog who accompanied him everywhere. The dog was old. His long tongue lolled out, and he panted loudly.

“Yep, this youngster killed his first Comanche,” Bigfoot said. “The Comanche was floating down the Brazos holding on to a dead mule. Young Call shot him point-blank.”

Caleb Cobb let his sleepy eyes shift to Call for a moment; then he looked back at the Irish dog.

“That’s alert behaviour, Mr. Call,” he said. “I’ll make you a corporal on the spot—we ain’t got many corporals in this troop, and I expect we’ll need a few.”

“I say it’s hasty, it could have been luck,” Captain Falconer said, annoyed. He thought young Call far too green for such distinction.

The Captain was wearing a black coat, and his mood seemed as dark as his garment. He was sharpening a knife on a large whetstone.

Caleb Cobb smiled.

“Now, Billy,” he said, “let me decide on the promotions. If a Comanche was to swim up on you, in the middle of a big river, underneath a dead mule, you might be scalped before you noticed the mule.”

“I have always been wary of dead animals when I cross rivers,” Captain Falconer said, stiffly. It was clear that he did not appreciate the Colonel’s remark.

“Would you go grind that knife out of my hearing?” Caleb asked. “It’s hard to think with you grinding that knife, and I need to think.”

Without a word, Falconer got up and walked away from the tent.

“Billy’s too well educated,” Caleb Cobb remarked. “He thinks he knows something. How many Comanches did the rest of you kill?”

“None,” Bigfoot admitted. “We might have winged one or two, but I doubt it. They was in good cover.”

The Colonel did not change expression, but the tone of his voice got lower.

“You lost five men and this cub’s the only one of you who was able to kill an Indian?” he asked.

“The weather was goddamn dim,” Bigfoot reminded him.

“It was just as dim for Buffalo Hump and his warriors,” Caleb said. “I won’t be sending out any more punishment squads, if this is the best we can do. I can’t afford to lose five men to get one Indian. From now on we’ll let them come to us. Maybe if we bunch up and look like an army we can get across the plains and still have a few men left to fight the Mexicans with, if we have to fight them.”

“Colonel, we didn’t have good horses,” Bigfoot said. “A few of us did, but the rest were poorly mounted. It cost three men their lives.”

“What happened to the other two—I thought you lost five,” Caleb asked. The big Irish dog had yellow eyes—Call had heard it said that the dog could run down deer, hamstring them, and rip out their throats. Certainly the dog was big enough—he was waist high to Bigfoot, and Bigfoot was not short.

“The other two weren’t lucky,” Bigfoot said. “I don’t know for sure that one of them is dead—but there’s no sign of him, so I suspect it.”

“If poor horseflesh is the reason you lost a third of your troop, go complain to the quartermaster,” the Colonel said. “I ain’t the wrangler. I will admit there’s a lot of puny horses in this part of Texas.”

“Thank you for the promotion,” Call said, though he didn’t know what it meant, to be a corporal. Probably there were increased duties—he meant to ask Brognoli, when he saw him next. But curiosity got the better of him, and he asked Bigfoot first.

“It just means you make a dollar more a month,” Bigfoot said. “Life’s just as dangerous, whether you’re a corporal or a private.”

“With a whole extra dollar you can buy more liquor and more whores,” Bigfoot added. “At least you can if you don’t let Gus McCrae cheat you out of your money.”

The company, in all its muddle and variety, was unlimbering itself for the day’s advance. Wagons and oxcarts were snaking through the rocky hills and bumping through the little scrubby valleys. Several of the more indolent merchants were already showing the effects of prairie travel—the dentist who had decided to emigrate to Santa Fe in hopes of doing a lucrative business with the Mexican grandees had tripped over his own baggage and fallen headfirst into a prickly-pear patch. A sandy-haired fellow with a pair of blacksmith’s pinchers was pulling prickly-pear thorns out of the dentist’s face and neck when Call strode by. The dentist groaned, but the groans, on the whole, were milder than the howls of his patients.

When Call located Gus McCrae and Johnny Carthage he was happy to see that Gus was his feisty self again, his ankle much improved. He was just hobbling back from visiting a young whore named Ginny—Caleb Cobb had permitted a few inexpensive women to travel with the company as far as the Brazos, after which, they had been informed, they would have to return to Austin, the expectation being that enough of the merchants would have given up by that point that the whores would have ample transport. Whether the Great Western would be an exception to this rule was a subject of much debate among the men, many of whom were reluctant to commit themselves to long-distance journeying without the availability of at least one accomplished whore.

“I wouldn’t call Matilda accomplished,” Johnny Carthage argued. “Half the time she ain’t even friendly. A woman that catches snapping turtles for breakfast is a woman to avoid, if you ask me.”

He was uncomfortably aware that he had only been partially successful at avoiding Matilda himself—in general, though, he preferred younger and smaller women, Mexican if possible.

Gus had picked up a spade somewhere and was using it intermittently as a crutch. His injured ankle would bear his weight for short distances, but occasionally, he was forced to give it a rest.

Gus had taken to wearing both his pistols in his belt, as if he expected attack at any moment.

“Howdy, did you get wet?” he asked, very glad to see Woodrow Call. Although Woodrow was contrary, he was the best friend Gus had. The thought that he might be killed, and not reappear at all, had given Gus two uneasy nights. Buffalo Hump had risen in his dreams, holding bloody scalps.

“I came near to drowning in the Brazos River, but I didn’t lose my gun,” Call said. He was especially proud of the fact that he hadn’t lost his gun, though no one else seemed to consider it much of an accomplishment.

“The river was up,” he added. “Most of the Comanches got away.”

“Did you see that big one?” Gus asked.

“I seen his hump,” Call said. “He floated down behind a log and put an arrow in a man standing right by me—split his backbone.”

The sun had broken through the last of the clouds—bright sunlight gleamed on the wet grass in the valleys and on the hills.

“I wish I could have gone—we would have killed several if we’d worked together,” Gus said.

Long Bill Coleman walked up about that time, in a joshing mood.

“Have you saluted him yet?” he asked Gus, to Call’s deep embarrassment.

“Why would I salute him, he’s my pard,” Gus said.

“He may be your pard but he’s a corporal now—he killed a red boy and the Colonel promoted him,” Long Bill said.

Gus could not have been more taken aback if Call had come back scalpless. The very thing that Clara teased him about had actually happened. Woodrow was Corporal Call now. No doubt Clara would hurry to court him, once they all got back.

“So that’s the news, is it?” Gus said, feeling slightly weak all of a sudden. He had not forgotten Clara and her kiss. Young Ginny had been pleasant, but Clara’s kiss was of another realm.

“Yes, he done it just now,” Call admitted, well aware that his friend would be at least a little discommoded by the news.

“You kilt one—what was it like?” Gus asked, trying to act normal and not reveal his acute discomfort at the fact of his friend’s sudden success.

“He was almost on me—I shot just in time,” Call said. “As soon as your ankle heals proper I expect we’ll have another engagement. Once you kill a Comanche the Colonel will promote you, too, and we can be corporals together.”

He wanted to do what he could to lighten the blow to his friend.

“If I don’t, then one will kill me and that will be the end of things,” Gus said, still feeling weak. “I just hope I don’t get scalped while I’m alive, like Ezekiel done.”

“Why, you won’t get killed,” Call said, alarmed at his friend’s sudden despondency. Gus possessed plenty of fight, but somehow that willful girl in the general store had deprived him of it. All he could think about was that girl—it was not good. You couldn’t be thinking about girls in general stores, when you were out in Indian country and needed to be alert.

With Call’s help, Gus at least managed to get saddled and mounted on the shorter of the two horses that had been assigned him. The two young Rangers rode side by side all day, at a lazy pace, while the wagons and oxcarts toiled up the low hills and across the valleys. Call told the story of the chase, and the fight by the river, but he couldn’t tell that his friend was particularly interested.

He held his tongue, though. At least Gus was in the saddle. Once they got across the Brazos, farther from the girl, he might eventually forget her and enjoy the rangering more.

In the afternoon of the third day they glimpsed a fold of the Brazos, curving between two hills, to the west. The falling sun brightened the brown water. To the east they couldn’t see the river at all, but gradually the Rangers at the head of the expedition, who included Gus and Call, heard a sound they couldn’t identify. It wasakin to the sound a cow might make, splashing through a river, only multiplied thousands of times, as if someone were churning the river with a giant churn.

Captain Falconer was at the very front of the troop, on his pacing black. When he heard the sound like water churning, he drew rein. Just as he did the Colonel’s big Irish dog shot past him, braying. His ears were laid back—in a second he was out of sight in the scrubby valley, but not out of earshot.

“It’s buf,” Shadrach said, pulling his rifle from its long sheath.

Just then, two riders came racing from the east. One of the rider’s horses almost jumped the Irish dog, which was racing in sight again. Then it raced away, braying loudly.

“Bes-Das has seen ‘em,” Shadrach said.

Bes-Das was a Pawnee scout—he ranged so far ahead that many of the Rangers had scarcely seen him. The other rider was Alchise, a Mexican who was thought to be half Apache. Both were highly excited by what they had seen behind the eastern hills. Colonel Cobb came galloping up to meet the two scouts; soon the three wheeled their horses and went flying after the dog. The horses threw up their heads and snorted. The excitement that had taken the troop when they thought they were racing to kill mountain goats seized them again—soon forty riders were flying after the Colonel, the Irish dog, and the two scouts.

As the horses fled down the hill, Gus clung tightly to his saddle horn. He could put a little weight on his wounded ankle, but not enough to secure a stirrup when racing downhill over such rocky terrain at such a pace. He knew that if he fell and injured himself further he would be sent home to Austin—all hope of securing promotion and matching his friend Call would be lost.

The sight they saw when they topped the next hill and drew rein with the troop was one neither Call nor Gus would ever forget. Neither of them, until that moment, had ever seen a buffalo, though on the march to the Pecos they had seen the bones of several, and the skulls of one or two. There below them, where the Brazos cut a wide valley, was a column of buffalo that seemed to Gus and Call to be at least a mile wide. To the south, approaching the river, there seemed to be an endless herd of buffalo moving through the hills and valleys. Thousands had already crossed the river and were plodding on to the north, through a little pass in the hills. So thick were the buffalo bunched, as they crossed the river, that it would have been possible to use them as a bridge.

“Look at them!” Gus said. “Look at them buffalo! How many are there, do you reckon?”

“I could never reckon no number that high,” Call admitted. “It’s more than I could count if I counted for a year.”

“This is the southern herd,” Captain Falconer commented— even he was too awed by the sight of the thousands of buffalo, browner than the brown water, to condescend to the young Rangers. “I expect it’s at least a million. They say it takes two days to ride past the herd, even if you trot.”

Bes-Das came trotting back to where Captain Falconer sat. He said something Call couldn’t hear, and pointed, not at the buffalo, but at a ridge across the valley some two miles away.

“It’s him!” Gus said with a gasp, grabbing his pistol. “It’s Buffalo Hump. He’s got three scalps on his lance.”

Call looked and saw a party of Indians on the far ridge, eight in all. He could see Buffalo Hump’s spotted pony and tell that the man was large, but he could not see scalps on his lance. He felt a little envious of his friend’s eyesight, which was clearly keener than his.