Текст книги "Dead Man's Walk"

Автор книги: Larry McMurtry

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“There’s no chance for that boy anyway,” the Major said grimly. “I should have shot his horse myself, before he got out of range. That way we could have saved the boy.”

All the Rangers watched the desperate race helplessly. They saw that what the Major said was true. Ezekiel Moody had no chance. Old Shadrach raised his long rifle in case Buffalo Hump strayed in range, but he didn’t expect it, and he didn’t fire.

“I hope he remembers what I told him about killing himself,” Bigfoot said. “He’d be better off to stop running and kill himself. It’d be the easiest thing.”

Ezekiel Moody had the same thought. He was running as fast as his legs could carry him, but when he looked back, he saw that the Indian with the great hump was closing fast. Ezekiel’s heart was beating so hard with fear that he was afraid it might burst. He had just come upon Josh Corn’s body when his horse went down. He had seen the great red cap of blood where Josh’s scalp had been. He had also seen the bloody arrow protruding from Josh’s throat.

Yet he was afraid to stop running and try to kill himself. He was afraid the Comanche would be on him before he could even get his pistol out. Also, he was getting close enough to the Rangers that one of them might make a lucky shot and hit Buffalo Hump, or turn him. Old Shadrach had been known to make some remarkable shots—maybe if he just kept running one of the Rangers would get off a good long shot.

Then abruptly Zeke changed his mind and gave up. He stopped and tried to yank out his pistol and shove it against his eyeball, as Bigfoot had instructed. He knew the Indian on the bloody horse was almost on him—he knew he had to be quick.

But when he got his pistol out, he turned to glance at the charging Indian, and the pistol dropped out of his sweaty hand. Before he could stoop for it the horse and the Indian were there: he had failed; he was caught.

Buffalo Hump reached down and grabbed the terrified boy by his long black hair. He yanked his horse to a stop, lifted Zeke Moody off his feet, and slashed at his head with a knife, just above the boy’s ears. Then he whirled and raced across the front of the huddled Rangers, dragging Zeke by the hair. As the horse increased its speed, the scalp tore loose and Zeke fell free. Buffalo Hump had whirled again, and held aloft the bloody scalp. Then he turned and rode away slowly, at a walk, to show his contempt for the marksmanship of the Rangers. The bloody scalp he still held high.

Ezekiel Moody stumbled through the sage and cactus, screaming from the pain of his ripped scalp. So much blood streamed over his eyes that he couldn’t see. He wanted to go back and find his pistol, so he could finish killing himself, but Buffalo Hump had dragged him far from where he had dropped the pistol. He could scarcely see, for blood. Zeke was in too much pain to retrace his steps. All he could do was stumble along, screaming in pain at almost every step.

Shadrach sighted on the Comanche with the big hump, as Buffalo Hump rode away. Then he raised his barrel a bit before he fired. It was an old buffalo hunter’s trick, but it didn’t work. Buffalo Hump was out of range, and Zeke Moody was scalped and screaming from pain.

“Ain’t nobody going to go get Zeke?” Matilda asked. The boy’s screams affected her—she had begun to cry. In peaceful times, back in San Antonio, Zeke had sometimes sat and played the harmonica to her.

“Somebody needs to help that boy, he’s bad hurt,” she said.

“Matilda, he’ll find his way here—once he gets a little closer we’ll go carry him in,” the Major said. “He oughtn’t to have left the troop —if young Corn hadn’t, he might be alive.”

The Major was a good deal annoyed by the predicament he found himself in. The scalp hunters had defected, the two captives were lost, one young Ranger was dead, and another disabled; Johnny Carthage had an arrow in his leg that so far nobody had been able to pull out; besides that they had lost two horses, one pack mule, and most of their ammunition. It seemed to him a dismal turn ofevents. He still had no idea how large a force he faced—the only Indian to show himself was the chief, Buffalo Hump, who had spent the morning having bloody sport at their expense.

“Well, this is merry,” Bigfoot said. “We’ve been running around like chickens, and Buffalo Hump has been cutting our heads off.”

“Now, he didn’t cut Zeke’s head off, just his hair,” Bob Bascom corrected. He was of a practical bent and did not approve of inaccurate statements, however amusing they might be.

“Zeke will have to keep his hat on this winter, I expect,” Bigfoot said. “He’s gonna scare the women, now that he’s been scalped.”

“He don’t scare me, he’s just a boy,” Matilda said. She was disgusted with the inaction of the men—so disgusted that she started walking out to help Zeke herself.

“Hold up, Matty, we don’t need you getting killed too,” the Major said.

Matilda ignored him. She had never liked fat officers, and this one was so fat he had difficulty getting his prod out from under his belly when he visited her. In any case, she had never allowed soldiers, fat or otherwise, to give her orders.

Call and Gus knelt together, keeping a tight hold on the bridle reins of their two horses. Both of them could see Zeke, whose whole face and body were red.

“I expect he’ll die from that scalping,” Call said. “I didn’t know people had that much blood in them,” Gus said. “I thought we was mostly bone inside.”

Call didn’t admit it, but he had the same belief; but from what he had seen that morning, it seemed that people were really just sacks of blood with legs and arms stuck on them.

“Keep close to me,” Gus said. “There might be some more of them sneaking devils around here close.”

“I am close to you,” Call said, still thinking about the blood. Now and again, working for the old blacksmith, he had cut himself, sometimes deeply, on a saw blade or a knife. But what he had seen in the last few minutes was different. The ground where Josh had been killed was soaked, as if from a red rain. It reminded him of the area behind the butcher stall in San Antonio, where beeves and goats were killed and hung up to drain. Now there was Zeke, a healthy man only a few minutes ago,staggering around with his scalp torn off. Call knew that if Buffalo Hump had been a few steps faster when he was chasing Gus, Gus would look like Josh or Zeke.

In San Antonio every man on the street, whether they were famous Indian fighters like Bigfoot, or just farmers in for supplies, told stories of Indian brutalities—Call had long known in his head that Indian fighting on the raw frontier between the Brazos and the Pecos was bloody and violent. But hearing about it and seeing it were different things. Rangering was supposed to be adventure, but this was not just adventure. This was struggle and death, both violent. Hearing about it and seeing it happen were different things.

“We’ll have to be watching every minute now,” Gus said. “We can’t just lope off anymore, looking for pigs to shoot. We have to be watching. These Indians are too good at hiding.”

Call knew it was true. He had glanced over at Josh Corn just as Josh was taking his pants down to shit, and had seen nothing at all that looked worrisome—just a few sage bushes. And yet the same humpbacked Indian who had chased Gus and nearly caught him had been hiding there. Not only that, he had managed to kill Josh and mutilate him without making a sound, with all the Rangers and Matilda just a few yards away.

Until that morning Call had never really felt himself to be in danger—not even when he had sat around the campfire and listened to the tortured Mexican scream. The Mexican had been a lone man, whereas they were a Ranger troop. Nobody was going to come into camp and bother them.

Now it had happened, though—an Indian had come within rock-throwing distance and killed Josh Corn. The same Indian had caught Zeke and scalped him, as quick as Sam, the cook, could wring a chicken’s neck.

Gus McCrae wished that his churning stomach would just settle. He wasn’t confident of his shooting, anyway—not beyond a certain distance—and he felt he was in a situation that might require him to shoot well, something that would not be easy, not with his stomach heaving and jerking. He wanted to be steady, but he wasn’t.

Another thing that had begun to weigh on Gus’s mind was that so far he had actually only been able to spot one Indian: Buffalo Hump. When he looked up on the mountain he couldn’t see theIndians who had shot the arrows down on them, and when he looked across the plain he couldn’t see the Indian or Indians who had shot the Major’s horse, and then Ezekiel’s, too.

For no reason, just as Gus was feeling as if he might have to dry heave a little bit more, he remembered the conversation Shadrach had had with the Major about the hundreds of Indians that might be coming down to attack Mexico. The thought of hundreds of Comanches, now that he had seen firsthand what one or two could do, was hard to get comfortable with. Their little troop was already down to ten men, assuming that Zeke died of the scalping. It wouldn’t take hundreds of Indians to wipe them out completely. It would only take three or four Indians—maybe less. Buffalo Hump might accomplish it by himself, if he kept at it.

“How many of them do you think are out there?” he asked Call, who was squeezing the barrel of his rifle so tightly it seemed as if he might be going to squeeze the barrel shut.

Call was having the same thoughts as his friend. If there were many Comanches out there, they would be lucky if any of the Rangers survived.

“I ain’t seen but one—him,” Call said. “There must be more, though. Somebody shot those horses.”

“That ain’t hard shooting,” Gus said. “Anybody can hit a horse.”

“They shot them while they were running and killed both of them dead,” Call said. “Who says that’s easy? Neither of them horses ever moved.”

“I expect there’s a passel of killers up on that mountain,” Gus said. “They shot a lot of arrows down on us. You’d think they’d have shot at Matilda. She’s the biggest target.”

To Call’s mind the remark was an example of his friend’s impractical thinking. Matilda Roberts wasn’t even armed. A sensible fighter would try to disable the armed men first, and then worry about the whores.

“The ones they ought to try for are Shadrach and Bigfoot,” Call said. “They’re the best fighters.”

“I aim to give them a good fight, if I can ever spot them,” Gus said, wondering if he could make true on his remark. His stomach was still pretty unsteady.

“I doubt there’s more than five or six of them out there,” he added, mostly in order to be talking. When he stopped talking he soon fell prey to unpleasant thoughts, such as how it would feel to be scalped, like Zeke was.

“How would you know there’s only five or six?” Call asked. “There could be a bunch of them down in some gully, and we’d never see them.”

“If there was a big bunch I expect they’d just come on and kill us,” Gus said.

“Matilda’s about got Zeke,” Call said.

When Matilda finally reached the injured boy, he had dropped to his knees and was scrabbling around in the dust, trying to locate his dropped pistol.

“Here, Zeke—I’m here,” Matilda said. “I’ve come to take you back to camp.”

“No, I have to find my gun,” Zeke said—he was startled that Matilda had come for him.

“I got to find it because that big one might come back,” he added. “I’ve got to do what Bigfoot said—poke the gun in my eyeball and shoot, before he comes back.”

“He won’t come back, Zeke,” Matilda said, trying to lift the wounded boy to his feet. “He’d have taken you with him, if he wanted you.” The sight of the boy’s head made her gag for a moment. She had seen several men shot or knifed in fights, but she had never had to look at a wound as bad as Zeke Moody’s head. His face seemed to have dropped, too—his scalp must have been what held it up.

“Come on, let’s go,” Matilda said, trying again to lift him up.

“Let me be, just help me find my pistol,” Zeke said. “I oughtn’t to have run. I ought to have just killed myself, like Bigfoot said. I ought to have just stopped and done it.”

Matilda caught Zeke under the arms and pulled him up. Once she had him on his feet, he walked fairly well.

“There ain’t no pistol, Zeke,” she said. “We’ll just get back with the boys. You ain’t dying, either. You just got your head skinned.”

“No, I can’t stand it, Matty,” Zeke said. “It’s like my head’s on fire. Just shoot me, Matty. Just shoot me.”

Matilda ignored the boy’s whimperings and pleadings and half walked, half dragged him back toward the troop. When they were about fifty yards from camp young Call came out to help her. He was a willing worker, who had several times helped her with small chores. When he saw Ezekiel Moody’s head, he went white. Gus McCrae came up to assist, and just as he arrived, Zeke passed out, from pain and shock. Bringing him in went easier once they didn’t have to listen to his moans and sobs. All three of them were soon covered with his blood, but they got him into camp and laid him down near Sam, who would have to do whatever doctoring could be done.

“God amighty!” Long Bill said, when he saw the red smear of Ezekiel’s head.

Johnny Carthage began to puke, while Bob Bascom walked away on shaky legs. Major Chevallie took one look at the boy’s head and turned away.

Bigfoot and Shadrach exchanged looks. They both wished the boy had gone on and killed himself. If any of them were to survive, they would need to move fast and move quietly, hard things to manage if you were packing a scalped man.

Sam squatted down by the boy and swabbed a little of the blood away with a piece of sacking. They had no water to spare—it would take a bucketful to wash such a wound effectively, and they didn’t have a bucketful to spare.

“We need to give him a hat,” Sam said. “Otherwise the flies will be gettin’ on this wound.”

“How long will it take him to scab over?” the Major asked.

Sam looked at the wound again and swabbed off a little more blood.

“Four or five days—he may die first,” Sam said.

Shadrach looked across the desert, trying to get some sense of where the Comanches were, and how many they faced. He thought there were three on the mountain, and probably at least three somewhere on the plain. He didn’t think the same warrior killed both horses. He knew there could well be more Indians, though. A little spur of the mountain jutted out to the south, high enough to conceal a considerable party. If they were lucky, there were no more than seven or eight warriors—about the normal size for a Comanche raiding party. If there were many more than that, the Comanches would probably have overrun them when they were strung out in their race to the mountain. At that point they could have been easily divided and picked off.

“I doubt there’s more than ten,” Bigfoot said. “If there was a big bunch of them our horses would smell their horses—they’d be kicking up dust and snorting.”

“They don’t need more than ten,” Shadrach said. “That humpback’s with ‘em.”

Bigfoot didn’t answer. He felt he could survive in the wilds as well as the next man, and there was no man he feared; but there were quite a few he respected enough to be cautious of, and Buffalo Hump was certainly one of those. He considered himself a superior plainsman; there wasn’t much country between the Sabine and the Pecos that he didn’t know well, and he had roved north as far as the Arkansas. He thought he knew country well, and yet he hadn’t spotted the gully where Buffalo Hump hid his horse, before he killed Josh Corn. Nor had he ever seen, or expected to see, a man scalped while he was still alive, though he had heard of one or two incidents of men who had been scalped and lived to tell the tale. In the wilds there were always surprises, always things to learn that you didn’t know.

Major Chevallie was nervously watching the scouts. He himself had a pounding headache, and a fever to boot. The army life disagreed with his constitution, and being harassed by Comanche Indians disagreed with it even more. Half his troop were either puking or walking unsteady on their feet, whether from fear or bad water he didn’t know. While he was pondering his next move he saw Matilda walking back out into the sage bushes, as unconcerned as if she were walking a street in San Antonio.

“Here, Matilda, you can’t just wander off—we’re not on a boulevard,” he said.

“I’m going to get Josh,” Matilda said. “I don’t intend to just leave him there, for the varmints to eat. If somebody will dig a grave while I’m gone I’ll bring Josh back and put him in it.”

Before she had gone twenty yards the Indians appeared from behind the jutting spur of mountain. There were nine in all, and Buffalo Hump was in the lead.

Major Chevallie wished for his binoculars, but his binoculars were on the horse that had been killed.

Several of the Rangers raised their rifles when the Indians came in sight, but Bigfoot yelled at them to hold their fire.

“You couldn’t hit the dern hill at that distance, much less the Indians,” he said. “Besides, they’re leaving.”

Sure enough the little group of Indians, led by Buffalo Hump, walked their horses slowly past the front of the Rangers’ position. They were going east, but they were in no hurry. They rode slowly, in the direction of the Pecos. Matilda was more than one hundred yards from camp by that time, looking for Josh Corn’s body, but she didn’t look at the Indians and they didn’t look at her.

Call and Gus stood together, watching. They had never before seen a party of Indians on the move. Of course, in San Antonio there were a few town Indians, drunk most of the time. Now and then they saw an Indian of a different type, one who looked capable of wild behaviour.

But even those unruly ones were nothing like what Call and Gus were watching now: a party of fighting Comanches, riding at ease through the country that was theirs. These Comanches were different from any men either of the young Rangers had ever seen. They were wild men, and yet skilled. Buffalo Hump had held a corpse on the back of his racing pony with one hand. He had scalped Zeke Moody without even getting off his horse. They were wild Indians, and it was their land they were riding through. Their rules were not white rules, and their thinking was not white thinking. Just watching them ride away affected young Gus and young Call powerfully. Neither of them spoke until the. Comanches were almost out of sight.

“I’m glad there was just a few of them,” Gus said, finally. “I doubt we could whip ‘em if there were many more.”

“We can’t whip ‘em,” Call said.

Just as he said it, Buffalo Hump stopped, raised the two scalps high once again, and yelled his war cry, which echoed off the hill behind the Rangers.

Gus, Call, and most of the Rangers raised their guns, and some fired, although the Comanche chief was far out of range.

“If we was in a fight and it was live or die, I expect we could whip ‘em,” Gus said. “If it was live or die I wouldn’t be for dying.”

“If it was live or die, we’d die,” Call said. What he had seen that morning had stripped him of any confidence he had once had in the Rangers as a fighting force. Perhaps their troop could fight well enough against Mexicans or against white men. But what he had seen of Comanche warfare—and all he had seen, other than the scalping of Zeke Moody, was a brief, lightning-lit glimpse of Buffalo Hump throwing his lance—convinced him not merely in his head but in his gilt and even in his bones that they would not have survived a real attack. Bigfoot and Shadrach might have been plainsmen enough to escape, but the rest of them would have died. “Any three of them could finish us,” Call said. “That one with the hump”could probably do it all by himself, if he had taken a notion to.

Gus McCrae didn’t answer. He was scared, and didn’t like the fact one bit. It wasn’t just that he was scared at the moment, it was that he didn’t know that he would ever be anything but scared again. He felt the need to move his bowels—he had been feeling the need for some time—but he was afraid to go. He didn’t want to move more than two or three steps from Call. Josh Corn had just gone a few steps—very few—and now Buffalo Hump was waving his scalp in the air. He was waving Ezekiel’s too, and all Zeke had done was ride a short distance out of camp. Gus was standing almost where Josh had been taken, too. Looking around, he couldn’t see how even a lizard could hide, much less an Indian, and yet Buffalo Hump had hidden there.

Gus suddenly realized, to his embarrassment, that his knees were knocking. He heard an unusual sound and took a moment or two to figure out that it was the sound of his own knees knocking together. His knees had never done that in his life—they had never even come close. He looked around, hoping no one had noticed, and no one had. The men were all still watching the Comanches. The men were all scared: he could see it. Maybe old Shadrach wasn’t, and maybe Bigfoot wasn’t, but the rest of them were mostly as shaky as he was. Matilda wasn’t, either—she was walking back, the body of Josh Corn in her arms.

Gus looked at Call, a man his own age. Call should be shaking, just as he was, but Call was just watching the Indians. He may not have been happy with the situation, but he wasn’t shaking. He was looking at the Comanches steadily. He had his gun ready, but mainly he just seemed to be studying the Indians.

“I don’t like ‘em,” Gus said, vehemently. He didn’t like it that there were men who could scare him so badly that he was even afraid to take a shit.

“I wish we had a cannon,” he said. “I guess they’d leave us alone if we was better armed.”

“We are better armed than they are,” Call said. “He killed Josh with an arrow and scalped Zeke with a knife. They shot arrows down on us from that hill. If they’d shot rifles I guess they would have killed most of us.”

“They have at least one gun, though,” Gus then pointed out. “They shot them horses.”

“It wouldn’t matter if we had ten cannons,” Call said. “We couldn’t even see ‘em—how could we hit them? I doubt they’d just stand there watching while we loaded up a cannon and shot at them. They could be halfway to Mexico while we were doing that.”

The Comanches were just specks in the distance by then.

“I have never seen no people like them,” Call said. “I didn’t know what wild Indians were like.

“Those are Comanches,” he added.

Gus didn’t know what his friend meant. Of course they were Comanches. He didn’t know what answer to make, so he said nothing.

Once Buffalo Hump and his men were out of sight, the troop relaxed a little—just as they did, a gun went off.

“Oh God, he done for himself!” Rip Green said.

Zeke Moody had managed to slip Rip’s pistol out of its holster— then he shot himself. The shot splattered Rip’s pants leg with blood.

“Oh God, now look,” Rip said. He stooped and tried to wipe the blood off his pants leg with a handful of sand.

Major Chevallie felt relieved. Travel with the scalped boy would have been slow, and in all likelihood he would have died of infection anyway. Johnny Carthage would be lucky to escape infection himself—Sam had had to cut clean to the bone to get the arrow out. Johnny had yelped loudly while Sam was doing the cutting, but Sam bound the wound well and now Johnny was helping Long Bill scoop out a shallow grave for young Josh.

“Now you’ll have to dig another,” the Major informed them.

“Why, they were friends—let ‘em bunk together in the hereafter,” Bigfoot said. “It’s too rocky out here to be digging many graves.”

“It’s not many—just two,” the Major said, and he stuck to his point. The least a fallen warrior deserved, in his view, was a grave to himself.

When Matilda saw what Zeke had done, she cried. She almost dropped Josh’s body, her big shoulders shook so.

“Matty’s stout,” Shadrach said, in admiration. “She carried that body nearly five hundred yards.”

Matilda sobbed throughout the burying and the little ceremony, which consisted of the Major reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Both boys had visited her several times—she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn’t last long, once they became men. Both of them, in her view, deserved better than a shallow grave by a hill beyond the Pecos, a grave that the varmints would not long respect.

“Do you think Buffalo Hump left?” the Major asked Bigfoot. “Or is he just toying with us?”

“They’re gone for now,” Bigfoot said. “I don’t expect they’ll interfere with us again, not unless we’re foolish.”

“Maybe the scalp hunters will kill them,” Long Bill suggested. “Killing Indians is scalp hunters’ work. Kirker and Glanton ought to get busy and do it.”

“I expect we’d best turn back,” the Major said. “We’ve lost two men, two horses, and that mule.”

“And the ammunition,” Shadrach reminded him.

“Yes, I ought to have transferred it,” the Major admitted.

He sighed, looking west. “I guess we’ll have to mark this road another time,” he said, in a tone of regret.

The scouts did not comment.

“Hurrah, we’re going back,” Gus said to Call once the news was announced.

“If they let us, we are,” Call said. He was looking across the plain where the Comanches had gone, thinking about Buffalo Hump.

The land before him, which looked so empty, wasn’t. A people were there who knew the emptiness better than he did; they knew it even better than Bigfoot or Shadrach. They knew it and they claimed it. They were the people of the emptiness.

“I’m glad I seen them,” Call said.

“I ain’t,” Gus said. “Zeke and Josh are dead, and I nearly was.”

“I’m still glad I seen them,” Call said.That day at dusk, as the troop was making a wary passage eastward, they found the old Comanche woman, wandering in the sage. A notch had been cut in her right nostril.

Of the tongueless boy there was no sign. When they asked the old woman what became of him she wailed and pointed north, toward the llano. Black Sam helped her up behind him on his mule, and they rode on, slowly, toward the Pecos.

“WHERE is SANTA FE?” Call asked, when he first heard that an expedition was being got up to capture it. Gus McCrae had just heard the news, and had come running as fast as he could to inform Call so the two of them could be among the first to join.

“They say Caleb Cobb’s leading the troop,” Gus said.

Call was as vague about the name as he had been about the place. Several times, it seemed to him, he had heard people mention a place called Santa Fe, but so far as he could recall, he had not until that moment heard the name Caleb Cobb.

Gus, who had been painting a saloon when the news reached him, was highly excited, but short on particulars.

“Why, everybody’s heard of Caleb Cobb,” he said, though in fact the name was new to him as well.

“No, everybody ain’t, because I ain’t,” Call informed him. “Is he a soldier, or what? I ain’t joining up if I have to work for a soldier again.”

“I think Caleb Cobb was the man who captured old Santa Anna,“Gus said. “I guess sometimes he soldiers and sometimes he don’t. I’ve heard that he fought Indians with Sam Houston himself.”

The last assertion was a pure lie, but it was a lie with a serious purpose, and the purpose was to overcome Woodrow Call’s stubborn skepticism and get him in the mood to join the expedition that would soon set out to capture Santa Fe.

Call had four mules yet to shoe and was not eager for a long palaver. There had been no rangering since the little troop had returned to San Antonio, though he and Gus were still drawing their pay.

Idleness didn’t suit him; from time to time he still lent old Jesus a hand with the horseshoeing. Gus McCrae rarely did anything except solicit whores; in all likelihood it was a pimp named Redmond Dale, owner of San Antonio’s newest saloon, who had talked Gus into doing the painting—no doubt he had offered free services as an inducement. What time Gus didn’t spend in the whorehouses he usually spent in jail. With no work to do he had developed a tendency to drink liquor, and drinking liquor made him argumentative. The day seldom passed without Gus getting into a fight, the usual result being that he would whip three or four sober citizens and be hauled off to jail. Even when he didn’t actually fight, he yelled or shot off his pistol or generally disturbed the peace.

“Anyway, we need to join up as soon as we can,” Gus said. “I think we have to go up to Austin to enlist. I sure don’t want to miss this expedition. Would you take them damn horseshoe nails out of your mouth and talk to me?”

Call had four horseshoe nails in his mouth at the time. To humour his friend he took them out and eased the mule’s hoof back on the ground for a minute.

“I still don’t know where Santa Fe is,” Call said. “I don’t want to join an expedition unless I know where it’s going.”

“I don’t see why not,” Gus said, irked by his friend’s habit of asking too many questions.

“All the Rangers are going,” Gus added. “Long Bill has already left to sign up, and Bob Bascom’s about to leave. Johnny Carthage wants to go bad, but he’s gimpy now—I doubt they’ll take him.”

The wound from the Comanche arrow had not healed well. One-eyed Johnny could still walk, but he was not speedy and would be at a severe disadvantage if he had to run.“I think Santa Fe’s out where we were the first time, only farther,” Call remarked.

“Well, it could be out that way,” Gus allowed. He was embarrassed to admit that he didn’t know much about the place the great expedition was being got up to capture.

“Gus, if it’s farther than we went the first time, we’ll never get there,” Call said. “Even if we do get there, what makes you think we can take it?”

“Why, of course we can take it!” Gus said. “Why are you so damn doubtful?”

Call shrugged, and picked up the horse’s hoof again.

“It’s a Mexican town—it’s just defended by Mexicans,” Gus insisted. “Of course we’ll take it, and take it quick. Caleb Cobb wouldn’t let a bunch of Mexicans whip him, I don’t guess!”

“I might go if I thought there would be somebody with us who could find the place,” Call said. “Is Bigfoot going?”