Текст книги "Dead Man's Walk"

Автор книги: Larry McMurtry

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

“Why, that’s better, perhaps I have smitten you.”

She closed the jar of liniment, eased his foot to the ground, and stood up.

“It does smell a little like sheepdip—that’s accurate,” she said. “What do you gentlemen use to wash with around this camp?”

“Nothing, nobody washes,” Gus admitted. “Sometimes we wash in a creek, if we’re traveling, but otherwise we just stay dirty.”

Clara picked up a shirt someone had thrown down, and carefully wiped her fingers on it.

“I hope the owner won’t mind a little sheepdip on his shirt,” she said.

“That’s Call’s extra shirt, he won’t mind,” Gus assured her.

“Oh, Corporal Call—where is he, by the way?” Clara asked.

“He ain’t a corporal, I told you that,” Gus said. He found her use of the term very irritating; that she felt the need to refer to Call at all was more than a little annoying.

“Nonetheless I intend to call him Corporal Call, and it’s not one bit of your business what I call him,” Clara said pertly. “I’m free to choose names for my admirers, I suppose.”

Gus was so annoyed that he didn’t know what to say. He sulked for a bit, thinking that if Call were there, he’d give him a punching, sore ankle or no sore ankle.

“Well, good-bye, Mr. McCrae,” Clara said. “I hope your ankle improves. If you’re still in camp tomorrow, I’ll come back and give it another treatment. I don’t want a crippled assistant, not with all the unpacking there is to do.”

To his surprise, she reached down and gave him a handshake— her fingers smelled of the liniment she had just rubbed on him.

“We’re supposed to pull out tomorrow—I hope we don’t, though,” Gus said.

“You know where the store is,” Clara said. “I certainly expect a visit, before you depart.”

She started to leave, and then turned and looked at him again. “Give my respects to Corporal Call,” she said. “It’s a pity he’s not more of a fool.”

“If he’s a corporal, I ought to be a corporal too,” Gus said, bitterly annoyed by the girl’s manner.

“Corporal McCrae—no, that don’t sound right,” Clara said. “Corporal Call—somehow that has a solid ring.” Then, with a wave, she walked off.

When Call came back to camp in the evening, sweaty from having loaded ammunition all day, he found Gus drunk and boiling. He was so mad his face turned red, and a big vein popped out on his nose.

“She calls you a corporal, you rascal!” Gus said in a furious voice. “I told you to stay clear of that store—if you don’t, when I get well, I’ll give you a whipping you’ll never forget.”

Call was taken completely by surprise, and Long Bill, Rip Green, and a new recruit named Jimmy Tweed, a tall boy from Arkansas, were all startled by Gus’s belligerence. Jimmy Tweed had not yet met Gus, and was shocked to find him so quarrelsome.

Call didn’t know what reply to make, and so said nothing. He had known that sometimes people took fevers and went out of their heads; he supposed that was what was the matter with Gus. He walked closer, to see if his friend was delirious, and was rewarded for his concern with a hard kick in the shin. Gus, though in a prone position, had still managed to get off the kick.

“Why, he’s unruly, ain’t he?” Jimmy Tweed said. “I expect if he wasn’t crippled we’d have to chain him down.”

“I don’t know you, stay out of it!” Gus warned. “I’d do worse than kick him, if I could.”

“I expect it’s fever,” Call said, at a loss to explain Gus’s behaviour any other way.

Before the dispute could proceed any further, Bigfoot came loping up on a big grey horse he had just procured.

“Buffalo Hump struck a farm off toward Bastrop,” he said. “An old man got away and spread the news. We’re getting up a troop, to go after the Indians. You’re all invited, except Gus and Johnny. Hurry up. We need to ride while the trail’s fresh.”

“Why ain’t I invited?” Johnny Carthage asked. He had just limped into camp.

“Because you got to do the packing,” Bigfoot said. “The expedition’s leaving early. I doubt we’ll be back. You got to get all this gear together and pack Gus into a cart or a wagon or something. We’ll meet you on the trail—if we survive.”

“This is a passel of stuff for one fellow to pack,” Johnny observed bleakly. “Gus won’t be no help, either—he’s poorly.”

“Not poorly enough—he just kicked my leg half off,” Call said. The more he thought about the incident, the more aggrieved he felt. All he had done all day was load ammunition—why did he have to be kicked because of some joke a girl made?

Shadrach came trotting up, his long rifle across his saddle. He didn’t say anything, but it was clear that he was impatient.

“Let’s go, boys—Buffalo Hump will be halfway to the Brazos by now,” Bigfoot said.

Call had been assigned a new mount that day. As yet he had barely touched him, but in a minute he was in the saddle. The little horse, a bay, jumped straight up, nearly throwing him; after that one jump, he didn’t buck again. Call only had time to grab his rifle and ammunition pouch. Shadrach had already left. Long Bill, RipGreen, and Jimmy Tweed were scrambling to get mounted. Bigfoot was the only calm man in camp. He reached down without dismounting and grabbed a piece of bacon someone had brought in, stuffing it quickly into his saddlebag.

“It’s a passel of stuff to pack up,” Johnny Carthage said again, looking at the litter of blankets, cook pots, and miscellaneous gear scattered around him.

“Oh, hush your yapping,” Bigfoot said.

Blackie Slidell came racing up—he had had his shirt off, helping to load a wagon, and was so fearful of being left that he had put it back on, wrong side out, as he rode.

Call looked down at Gus—he was still prone, but not so angry.

“I have no idea what you’re riled about,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you up the trail.”

“Good-bye,” Gus said, suddenly sorry for his angry behaviour. Before he could say more, Bigfoot wheeled his horse and loped off after Shadrach; the Rangers, still assembling themselves, followed as closely as they could.

Gus felt a sudden longing to be with them, though he knew it was impossible. Tears came to his eyes, as he watched his companions lope away. It would be lonely with no one but the cranky Johnny Carthage to talk to all night.

In a minute or two, though, he felt better. His ankle still felt full of needles, but Clara Forsythe had said she would come and rub more liniment on his sore ankle, if the expedition didn’t depart too early. All he had to do was get through the night, and he would see her again.

What made him feel even better was that this time he would have Clara all to himself. Call was gone. The thought cheered him so that within ten minutes he was pestering Johnny to go buy them a fresh jug of whiskey from the Mexican peddler.

“I can’t be getting too drunk, I got all this packing to do,” Johnny protested, but Gus shrugged his protest off.

“You just buy the whiskey,” he instructed. “I’ll do the getting drunk.”

A STORM BLEW UP during the night, with slashing rain and wind and thunder. Shadrach and Bigfoot paid the weather no attention— they set a fast pace, and didn’t stop. In the dark, Call grew fearful of falling behind and being lost. They cut through several clumps of live oak and scrub—he was afraid he and his little bay would fight themselves out of a thicket, only to find themselves alone. He stayed as close to the rump of the horse in front of him as he could. He didn’t want to get lost on his first Indian chase. The party consisted of fifteen men, many of whom he didn’t know. Call would have thought it would be easy to keep fifteen riders in sight, but he hadn’t counted on the difficulties posed by rain and darkness. At times, he couldn’t see his own horse’s head—he had to proceed on sense, like a night-hunting animal.

It was a relief, when the smoky, foggy dawn came, to see that he was still with the troop. All the men were soaked, streams of water running from their hats or their hair. There was no stopping for breakfast. Shadrach peeled off, and ranged to the north of the troop. He was lost to sight for an hour or more, but when they came to the burned-out farm he was there, examining tracks.

At first, Call saw no victims—he supposed the family had escaped. The cabin had been burned; though a few of the logs still smouldered. The area around the cabin was a litter, most of it muddy now. There were clothes and kitchen goods, broken chairs, a muddy Bible, a few bottles. The corn-shuck mattresses had been ripped open, and the corn shucks scattered in the mud.

Bigfoot dismounted, and stepped inside the shell of the cabin for a moment—then he stepped out.

“Where are they?” he asked Shadrach, who looked up briefly and pointed to the nearby cornfield.

“Call, gather up them wet sheets,” Bigfoot said. Several muddy sheets were amid the litter.

“Why?” Call asked, puzzled.

“To wrap them in—why else?” Bigfoot said, swinging back on his horse.

The woman lay between two corn rows, six arrows in her chest, her belly ripped up. The man had been hacked down near a little rock fence—when they ripped his scalp off, a long tear of skin had come loose with the scalp, running down the man’s back. A boy of about ten had three arrows in him, and had had his head smashed in with a large rock. A younger boy, six or seven maybe, had a big wound in his back.

“Lanced him,” Bigfoot said. “I thought there was a young girl here.”

“They took her,” Shadrach informed him. “They took the mule, too. I expect that’s what she’s riding.”

Call felt trembly, but he didn’t throw up. He noticed Bigfoot and Shadrach watching him, from the edge of the cornfield. Though they had all expected carnage, most of them had not been prepared for the swollen, ripped-open bodies—the smashed head, the torn stomach.

“Roll them in the sheets, best you can,” Bigfoot told him. “When you get to the woman, just break them arrows off. They’re in too deep to pull out.”

Shadrach walked over and squatted by the dead woman for a moment—he seemed to be studying the arrows. Then he tugged gently at an arrow in the center of the woman’s breastbone.

“This one’s gone clean through, into the ground,” he said. “This is Buffalo Hump’s arrow.”

“How do you know that?” Call asked.

Shadrach showed him the feathers at the end of the arrow.

“Them’s from a prairie chicken,” he said. “He always feathers his arrows with prairie chicken. He stood over her and shot that arrow clean through her breastbone.”

Bigfoot came over and looked at the arrow, too. The woman’s body didn’t budge. It was as if it were nailed to the ground. It was a small, skinny arrow, the shaft a little bent. Call tried to imagine the force it would take to send a thin piece of wood through a woman’s body and into the dirt. Several of the new men came over and stood in silence near the body of the woman. One or two of them glanced at the body briefly, then walked away. Several of them gripped their weapons so hard their knuckles were white. Call remembered that it had been that way beyond the Pecos—men squeezing their guns so hard their knuckles turned white. They were scared: they had ridden out of Austin into a world where the rules were not white rules, where torture and mutilation awaited the weak and the unwary, the slow, the young.

Bigfoot rode off with Shadrach to study the trail, leaving Call to wrap the four bodies in the muddy sheets. From the center of the cornfield the little cabin, now just a shell, its logs still smouldering, seemed small and sad to Call. The little family had built it, with much labor, in the clearing, sheltered in it, worked and planted their crops. Then, in an hour or less, it was all destroyed: four of them dead, one girl captured, the cabin burnt. Even the milk cow was dead, shot full of arrows. The cow was bloated now, its legs sticking up in the air.

Call did his best with the bodies, but when it came to the woman, he had to ask Blackie Slidell for help. Blackie had to take her feet and Call her arms before they could pull her free, so deep was Buffalo Hump’s arrow in the ground. Call had butchered several goats and a sheep or two, when he worked for Jesus—the woman he was trying to wrap in a wet, mouldy sheet had been butchered, just like a sheep.

“Lord, I hope we can whip ‘em if we catch up to them,” Blackie said, in a shaky voice. “I don’t want one of them devils catching me.”

Long Bill came over and helped Call with the graves. “I’ll help— I’d rather be working than thinking,” he said.

They scooped out four shallow graves, rolled the bodies in them, and covered them with rocks from the little rock fence the family had been building.

“They won’t need no fence now,” Rip Green observed. “All that work, and now they’re dead.”

Before they had quite finished the burying, Bigfoot and Shadrach came loping back. Bigfoot had the body of a dead girl across his horse.

“Here’s the last one—bury her,” Bigfoot said, easing the body down to Call. “The mule went lame a few miles from here. I guess they didn’t have no horse to spare for this girl. They brained her and shot the mule.”

A little later, as the troop was riding north, they passed the dead mule. A big piece had been cut out of its haunch.

“Shadrach done that,” Bigfoot said. “He says the game’s poorly this year, and it was a fat mule.”

They rode north all day, into a broken country of limestone hills. It rained intermittently, the clouds low. In the distance, some of the clouds rested on the low hills, like caps. Now and again Shadrach or Bigfoot rode off in one direction or another, but never for long. In the afternoon, they stopped and cooked the mule meat. Shadrach cut the haunch into little strips and gave each man one, to cook as preferred. Call stuck his on a stick and held it over the fire until it was black. He had never planned to eat mule and didn’t expect to like the taste, but to his surprise the meat was succulent—it tasted fine.

“When will we catch ‘em?” he asked Bigfoot at one point. They had not seen a trace of the Comanches—yet for all he knew, they were close, in one of the rocky valleys between the hills. Several times, as they rode north, he kept his eyes to the ground, trying to make out the track that the troop was following. But all he saw was the ground. He would have liked to know what clues the two scouts picked up to guide the chase, but no one offered to inform him. He was reluctant to ask—it made him seem too ignorant. But in fact he was ignorant, and not happy about it. At least Shadrach had taught him how to identify Buffalo Hump’s arrow—he thought he could recognize the feathers again, if he saw them. That was the only piece of instruction to come his way, though.

When he asked Bigfoot when he thought they would catch up with the Comanches, Bigfoot looked thoughtful for a moment.

“We won’t catch them,” he said.

Call was puzzled. If the Rangers weren’t going to catch the enemy, why were they pursuing them at all?

Bigfoot’s manner did not invite more questions. He had been eager, back on the Rio Grande, to talk about the finer points of suicide, but when it came to their pursuit of the Comanche raiding party, he was not forthcoming. Call rode on in silence for a few miles, and then tried again.

“If we ain’t going to catch them, why are we chasing them?” he asked.

“Oh, I just meant we can’t outrun them,” Bigfoot said. “They can travel faster than we can. But we might catch ‘em anyway.”

“How?” Call asked, confused.

“There’s only one way to catch an Indian, which is to wait for him to stop,” Bigfoot said. “Once they get across the Brazos they’ll feel a little safer. They might stop.”

“And then we’ll kill them?” Call said—he thought he understood now.

“Then we’ll try,” Bigfoot said.

To Gus’s DISMAY, THE order to move out of Austin came at three in the morning. Captain Falconer rode through the camps on a snorting, prancing horse, telling the men to get their gear.

“Colonel Cobb’s ready,” he informed them. “No lingering. We’ll be leaving town at dawn.”

“Dern, it’s the middle of the night,” Johnny Carthage said. Though he had been provided with two mules and a heavy cart, he had as yet totally neglected his instructions in regard to packing. Instead, he and Gus had got drunk. Nothing was packed, and it was raining and pitch dark.

Gus’s preparations for the grand expedition to Santa Fe consisted in dragging himself, his guns, and a blanket into the heavy cart. Then he huddled in the cart, so drunk that he was not much bothered by the fact that Johnny Carthage was pitching every object he could get his hands on in on top of him. The cooking pots, the extra saddlery, blankets and guns, ropes and boxes of medicines, were all heaped in the cart, with little care taken as to placement.

“Why do we have to leave in the middle of the night?” Gus asked, several times—but Johnny Carthage was muttering and coughing; he made no reply. He had an old lantern, and was searching all around the large area of the camp, well aware that he would be blamed if he left anything behind. But with only one eye and a gimpy leg, and with Gus too crippled and too drunk to help, gathering up the belongings of the whole troop on a dark, rainy night was chancy work.

At some point well before dawn, Quartermaster Brognoli made a tour of the area, to see that the fifteen or twenty different groups of free-ranging adventurers, many of them merchants or would-be merchants, were making adequate progress toward departure. Gus stuck his head out from under a dripping blanket long enough to talk to him a minute.

“Why leave when it’s dark?” he asked. “Why not wait for sunup?”

Brognoli had taken a liking to the tall boy from Tennessee. He was green but friendly, and he moved quick. Years of trying to get soldiers on the move had given Brognoli a distaste for slow people.

“Colonel Cobb don’t care for light nor dark,” he informed Gus. “He don’t care for the time of day or the month or the year. When he decides to go, we go.”

“But three in the morning’s an odd time to start an expedition,” Gus pointed out.

“No, it’s regular enough,” Brognoli said. “If we start pushing out about three the stragglers will clear Austin by six or seven. Colonel Cobb left an hour ago. We’re going to stop at Bushy Creek for breakfast, so we better get moving. If we ain’t there when the Colonel expects us, there won’t be no breakfast.”

The mules were hitched, and the cart with all the Rangers’ possessions in it was moving through the center of Austin when Gus McCrae suddenly remembered Clara Forsythe. More than thirty wagons, small herds of sheep and beef cattle, and over a hundred horsemen of all ages and degrees of ability were jostling for position in the crowded streets. Some of the mule skinners had lanterns, but most didn’t. There were several collisions and much cursing. Once or twice, guns were fired. Occasional lightning lit the western sky— the faint grey of a cloudy dawn was just visible to the east.

The reason Gus remembered Clara was that the little cart, driven by a wet, tired, apprehensive Johnny Carthage, happened to passright in front of the general store. Gus suddenly recalled that the pretty young woman he had such a desire to marry had been meaning to come and rub liniment on his wounded ankle sometime during the day that was just dawning. He had been drinking for quite a few hours—most of the hours since he fell off the bluff, in fact—and had reached such a depth of drunkness that he had temporarily forgotten the most important fact of all: Clara, his future wife.

“Stop, I got to see her!” he told Johnny, who was urging the mules through a sizable patch of mud, while at the same time trying to avoid colliding with the wagon containing the comatose General Lloyd. He knew it was General Lloyd’s wagon because a kind of small tent had been erected in it so the General could be protected from the elements while he drank and snoozed.

“What?” Johnny Carthage asked.

“Stop, goddamn you—stop!” Gus demanded. “I’ve got business in the general store.”

“But it ain’t open,” Johnny protested. “If I stop now we’ll never get out of this mud.”

“Stop or I’ll strangle you, damn you!” Gus said. It was not a threat he had ever made before, but he was so desperate to see Clara that he felt he could carry it out. Johnny Carthage didn’t hear it, though —one of the mules began to bray, just at that moment, and a rooster that had managed to get in General Lloyd’s wagon was crowing loudly, too.

The mud was thick—the cart was barely inching forward anyway, so Gus decided to just flop out of it. In his eagerness to get to Clara he forgot about his sore ankle, though only until the foot attached to it hit the ground. The pain that surged through him was so intense that he tried to flop forward, back into the cart, but the cart lurched ahead just as he did it, and he went facedown into the slick mud. The patch of mud was deep, too—Gus was up to his elbows in it, trying to struggle up onto his one good foot, when he thought he heard a peal of girlish laughter somewhere above him.

“Look, Pa, it’s Mr. McCrae—come to propose to me, I expect,” Clara said.

Gus looked up to see a white figure, standing at a window above the street. Although he knew he was muddy, his heart lifted at the thought that at least he had not missed Clara. It was her. She was laughing at him, but what did that matter? He looked up, wishing the sun would come out so he could see her better. But he knew it was her, from the sound of her voice and the fact that she was at a window above the store. The thought of her father seeing him in such a state was embarrassing—but in fact, there was no sign of the old man. Perhaps she was just joshing him—she did seem to love to josh.

“Ain’t you coming down?” he asked. “I’ve still got this sore foot.”

“Shucks, what kind of a Romeo would fall off a bluff and hurt his foot just when it’s time to propose to Juliet?” Clara asked. “You’re supposed to sing me a song or two and then climb up here and beg me to marry you.”

“What?” Gus asked. He had no idea what the woman was talking about. Why would he try to climb up the side of the general store when all she would have to do was come down the stairs? He had seen the stairs himself, when he was in the store helping her unpack.

“What, you ain’t read Shakespeare—what was wrong with your schooling?” Clara asked.

Gus’s head had cleared a little. He had been so drunk that his vision swam when he got to his feet—or foot. He still held his sore ankle just above the mud. Now that he was upright he remembered that his sisters had been great admirers of the writer Shakespeare, though exactly what had occurred between Romeo and Juliet he could not remember.

“I can’t climb—won’t you come down?” he said. Why would Clara think a man standing on one foot in a mud puddle could climb a wall, and why was she going on about Shakespeare when he was about to leave on a long expedition? He felt very nearly exasperated—besides that, he couldn’t stand on one foot forever.

“Well, I guess I might come down, though it is early,” Clara said. “We generally don’t welcome customers this early.”

“I ain’t a customer—I want to marry you, but I’ve got to leave,” he said. “Won’t you come? Johnny won’t wait much longer.”

In fact, Johnny was having a hard time waiting at all. The expedition was flowing in full force through the streets of Austin; there was the creak of harness, and the swish of wagon wheels. Johnny had tried to edge to the side, but there wasn’t much space—a fat mule skinner cursed him for the delay he had caused already.

“Won’t you come?—I have to go,” Gus said. “We’re hurrying to meet Colonel Cobb—he don’t like to wait.”

Clara didn’t answer, but she disappeared from the window, and a moment later, opened the door of the general store. She had wrapped a robe around her and came right down the steps of the store, barefoot, into the muck of the street.

“Goodness, you’ll get muddy,” Gus said—he had not supposed she would be so reckless as to walk barefoot into the mud.

Clara ignored the remark—young Mr. McCrae was muddy to the elbows and to the knees. She could tell that he was drunk—but he had not forgotten to call on her. Men were not perfect, she knew; even her father, kindly as he was, flew into a temper at least once a month, usually while doing the accounts.

“I don’t see Corporal Call—what’s become of him?” she asked.

“Oh now … you would ask, “Gus complained. “He’s off chasing Indians. He ain’t no corporal, either—I’ve told you that.”

“Well, in my fancy he is,” Clara retorted. “Don’t you be brash with me.”

“I don’t want him anywhere in your damn fancy!” Gus said. “For all we know he’s dead and scalped, by now.”

Then he realized that he didn’t want that, either. Annoying as Call was, he was still a Ranger and a friend. Clara’s quick tongue had provoked him—she would mention Call, even in the street at dawn, with the expedition leaving.

“Now, don’t be uncharitable to your friend,” Clara chided. “As I told you before, he would never do for me—too solemn! You ain’t solemn, at least—you might do, once you’ve acquired a little polish and can remember who Romeo is and what he’s supposed to do.”

“I ain’t got the time—will you marry me once I get back?” he asked.

“Why, I don’t know,” Clara said. “How should I know who’ll walk into my store, while you’re out wandering on the plains? I might meet a gentleman who could recite Shakespeare to me for hours— or even Milton.”

“That ain’t the point—I love you,” Gus said. “I won’t be happy a minute, unless I know you’ll marry me once I get back.”

“I m afraid I can’t say for sure, not right this minute,” Clara said. “But I will kiss you—would that help?”

Gus was so startled he couldn’t answer. Before he could move she came closer, put her hands on his muddy arms, reached up her face, and kissed him. He wanted to hug her tight, but didn’t—he felt he was all mud. But Gus kissed back, for all he was worth. It was only for a second. Then Clara, smiling, scampered back to the porch of the general store, her feet and ankles black with mud.

“Good-bye, Mr. McCrae, don’t get scalped if you can help it,” she said. “I’ll struggle on with my unpacking as best I can, while you travel the prairies.”

Gus was too choked with feeling to answer. He merely looked at her. Johnny Carthage was yelling at him, threatening to leave him. Gus began to hobble toward the cart, still looking at Clara. The sun had peeked through the clouds. Clara waved, smiling. In waving back, Gus almost slipped. He would have gone down again in the mud, had not a strong hand caught his arm. Matilda Jane Roberts, the Great Western, plodding by on Tom, her large grey, saw his plight just in time and caught his arm.

“Here, hold the saddle strings—just hold them and hop, I’ll get you to Johnny,” she said.

Gus did as he was told. He looked back, anxiously, wondering what the young woman who had just kissed him would think, seeing a whore help him out, so soon after their kiss.

But the porch of the general store was empty—Clara Forsythe had gone inside.

WHEN THE TROOP OF Rangers reached the Brazos River, the wide brown stream was in flood. The churning water came streaming down from the north, through the cut in the low hills where the Rangers struck the river.

The hills across the river were thick with post oak and elm. Call remembered how completely the Comanches had managed to hide themselves on the open plain. Finding them in thickets such as those across the river would be impossible.

Long Bill looked apprehensive, when he saw that the Brazos was in flood.

“If half of us don’t get drowned going over, we’ll get drowned coming back,” he observed. “I can’t swim no long distance. About ten yards is my limit.”

“Hang on to your horse, then,” Bigfoot advised. “Slide off and grab his tail. Don’t lose your holt of it, either. A horse will paw you down if he can see you in the water.”

Call’s little bay was trembling at the sight of the water. Shadrach had ridden straight into the river and was already halfway across. He clung to his saddle strings with one hand, and kept the long rifle above the flood with the other. Bigfoot took the water next; his big bay swam easily. The rest of the Rangers lingered, apprehension in their eyes.

“This is a mighty wide river,” Blackie Slidell said. “Damn the Comanches! They would beat us across.”

Call thumped the little grey’s sides with his rifle, trying to get him to jump in. It was time to go—he wanted to go. The horse made a great leap into the water and went under briefly, Call with him. But once in, the little horse swam strongly. Call managed to catch his tail—holding the rifle up was tiring. When, now and then, he caught a glimpse of the far shore, it seemed so far away that he didn’t know if a horse could swim that far. Curls of reddish water kept breaking over his head. In only a minute or two, he lost sight of all the other Rangers. He might have been in the river alone, for all he could tell. But he was in it: there was nothing to do but cling to the horse’s tail and try to keep from drowning.

When Call was halfway across, he caught a glimpse of something coming toward him, on the reddish, foaming flood. It seemed to be a horse, floating on its side. Just at that time he went under—when his head broke the surface again he saw that it was actually a dead mule, all bloated up, floating right down at him. The little bay horse was swimming as hard as he could—it looked, for a moment, as if the dead mule was going to surge right into them. Call thought his best bet might be to poke the mule aside with his rifle barrel; and he twisted a little and brought the rifle into position, meaning to shove the mule away. Just as he twisted he saw two eyes that weren’t dead and weren’t mule’s eyes, staring at him from between the stiff legs of the dead mule. The mule and the Indian boy floating down with him were only five feet away when Call fired. The boy had just raised his hand, with a knife in it, when the bullet took him in the throat. Then the mule and the body of the dying boy crashed into Call, carrying him under and loosening his grip on the bay gelding’s tail. Call went under, entangled with the corpse of the Comanche boy he had just killed. The red current rolled them over and over— all Call knew was that he mustn’t lose his musket. He clung to the gun even though he knew he might be drowning. He was so confused for a moment that he didn’t know the difference between upand down. It seemed to him he was getting deeper into the water; it was all just a red murk, with sticks and bits of bushes floating in it, but then he felt himself being lifted and was able to draw his breath.