The Texans (20 page)

Agent Torrey was staggering drunk by the time they stopped for the night. He tripped and fell while getting off his horse, and was unable to get back to his feet. He soon ceased his struggles and passed out, still holding the rein of his horse and with his tied-down hat squashed like an accordion over his face.

But Captain Jones and the commissioner made it plain that one of them was going to stay on guard. The captain lay down across the fire from the Comanches with his weapons close to hand. The commissioner took the first watch and sat wide awake with his saddle for a chair and his rifle across his knees. He kept a careful eye on the Comanches, who appeared to be sleeping. Red Wing curled up in her blanket at the commissioner's feet, clutching her little knife tightly in her hand.

The Comanches woke early and full of vigor. Apparently, they had slept like babies and were ready for breakfast. Despite the attempt to stand guard in shifts, the commissioner and the captain didn't look to have gotten much sleep. Red Wing knew that she hadn't. She had jerked awake every few minutes to check if the Comanches were still in their beds.

After a quick meal of buffalo meat, they started on their way. They crossed the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red before the sun was well up, and headed across a broad plain. By midday they were in sight of a line of hills rising up to the south. Soon, the smoke from a large number of campfires could be seen. Red Wing's eyes could barely make out the pale gleam of many tepees scattered along the edges of some canyon lands south of the hills.

The village spotted them quickly, and a large group of warriors raced out on their horses to surround them. Greetings and explanations were passed back and forth between the Peace Commission's guides and the newcomers. The welcome the Comanches gave their visitors was a cold one, but they escorted them toward the camp just the same.

The village consisted of at least sixty lodges, and the women and children stopped what they were doing to watch them pass. More warriors stared at them from where they sat in front of the tepees, and the camp dogs raced among the trotting horses, barking at all the excitement. Red Wing met the curious gaze of a woman fanning away the blowflies from the raw buffalo robe she was scraping. She was covered in grease and bloodstains all the way up to her elbows, and kneeling before the stretched hide like it was an altar. Red Wing had seen her own mother in just the same position many times.

Their escort led them to a large tepee near the center of the camp, where a short, bow-legged warrior appeared to be waiting for them with a group of elder men. They pulled up before him, and the commissioner gave the old Comanches a broad wave. The bow-legged warrior slowly lifted his palm in greeting, while the entire camp pressed in around them.

“Try that Mexican talk on them again. Tell him the same thing you told those two earlier, and make us sound impressive,” the commissioner said out the side of his mouth to Captain Jones.

The captain spoke loudly, even if he did get hung up often while he searched for the proper words. The bowlegged warrior apparently didn't speak Spanish, and he turned to a wrinkled old man beside him for translation. When the captain was through, the bowlegged warrior gave an equally long speech, and his old friend repeated what he said in Spanish.

“His name is Iron Shirt, and I gather he is some sort of medicine man or chief, or maybe both. He says he will make no promises, but the men of his village will at least hear us out,” the captain said.

Iron Shirt stepped to where he had a better view of Red Wing sitting her horse behind the commissioner. He studied her carefully and then said something for his interpreter to repeat.

“Iron Shirt says that the woman we bring him doesn't look like a Comanche. He wonders if we have made some mistake,” the captain said.

Commissioner Anderson eased off of his horse and motioned Red Wing to do the same. She studiously ignored him and all about her and kept her chin lifted and her eyes on the top of the tepee.

“Get down and meet your cousins,” the captain said dryly.

Red Wing looked at him like he was trash. She held out a bent wrist to the commissioner and lifted her chin higher. “A lady should be given help dismounting.”

Agent Torrey raised his eyebrows above his glasses at her demand. She had been mounting and dismounting on her own halfway across Texas, and he couldn't imagine why she needed help. But then again, his hangover was too bad to think properly.

The commissioner smiled wryly. “Nice act. I almost hope you succeed in convincing them that you don't belong here.”

He took her hand while she unhooked her leg from the sidesaddle's post and steadied her stirrup as she stepped down. He watched as she tucked her hair in place and brushed down the front of her dress. She walked forward with a grace all her own and eyed the Comanches around her as if she was on a sightseeing trip that she found especially boring.

Iron Shirt said something to her, but she frowned with feigned confusion. He quickly turned away from her with a dissatisfied grunt. He headed for the door of his tepee, saying something to his interpreter in passing. The old man heard him out and scowled at the Peace Commission. He and the captain had a brief discussion, and then he and the rest of the elders disappeared into the tepee behind Iron Shirt.

“I take it that didn't go so well,” the commissioner said.

“Iron Shirt doesn't believe that Red Wing was ever a Comanche, and if she was, she has been so long with us that she might as well be dead,” the captain said.

“How did he take to the notion of the peace talks at Fort Bird?”

“All he would commit to was to discuss the matter with you. He said that there are many more Comanches who will arrive this evening. Once most of his band is here they will call a council to hear what you have to say. For now, we are supposed to wait.”

One of their earlier guides led them to an empty tepee a few yards from Iron Shirt's. He told the captain that it was for them to use and quickly disappeared. Two young boys showed up to take their horses, and the commissioner knew he was too outnumbered to argue about giving them up. They unsaddled and pitched their gear into the lodge and watched their only means of escape led away.

Commissioner Anderson casually surveyed the number of Comanches still watching them. Supposedly they weren't captives, but it still felt that way. Agent Torrey and Red Wing had already gone into the tepee, but he didn't want to appear to be so scared as to hide like a rabbit in a hole. He smiled at the Comanches and took his sweet time going into the lodge.

“Well, we finally found them,” he said to the captain.

Captain Jones spat in the dust. “Yes, sir, I'd say we've stepped right in the middle of it.”

Chapter 23

P
atience was a virtue that Odell wasn't sure he would ever possess. Red Wing was somewhere out there alone and in danger, and every single mile of the long journey to find her seemed more like five. Common sense told him that a horse could only travel so far, so fast, but the nervous energy inside him couldn't be kept down. The only thing that soothed his impatience was the scouting and hunting trips he took away from the column with Son Ballard. There was something about the lonely, wide-open country that Odell loved, and the old scout was a veritable wealth of information when it came to living in the wilds.

Son might grumble and growl about Odell asking too many questions, but he inevitably answered each and every one of them. Odell came to learn that there was a difference between looking and seeing. Months on the prairies and plains had given him a crash course in survival, but Son taught him to observe his surroundings and to interpret what he saw. Reading sign wasn't just the ability to track, but was instead knowing the land intimately.

Water was everything in arid country, and the ability to find it was the difference between life and death. The Indians and the scant few seasoned plainsmen like Son read the minutest details of nature, from the wildlife and vegetation, right down to even the smallest insect. The tracks of wild horses going to water were easily separated from those they made going away. A thirsty herd traveled with a businesslike determination, while one with its bellies sloshing full scattered wider and grazed along at a more leisurely pace. Swallows built dirt nests, and a keen eye would notice that a mouthful of mud meant the bird was flying away from water. Doves drank often, and a scout could follow their flight just before dusk to where they watered. Cottonwood trees required regular moisture, but a belt of green in a distant drainage didn't always lead a man to standing water. And as Odell had already come to know, a waterhole or a stream didn't necessarily mean a healthy drink. Many of the waterings of that country, especially along the foot of the Llano, were so laden with salt and gypsum as to be undrinkable or were not to be counted on to be wet year around.

Fire was as important as water when the weather could seemingly change in the blink of an eye. Wood for fuel was scarce, but dried buffalo chips made a hot fire. Son carried a length of hollow cane with cotton threaded through it, and a bit of the fluff twisted out one end of the stick readily took a spark from a flint and steel. On a rainy day, cloth soaked in corncob ashes or gunpowder and then dried was often the difference between fire and no fire.

Odell had grown up among timbered mountains, and at first sight the open country seemed almost barren—nothing but brown grass and sky—but he was coming to know its bounty. Besides the buffalo, mule deer, and antelope, which were new to him, many of the game animals he had hunted in Georgia and the woods along the Colorado River made their homes on the plains, and it was just a matter of adapting his hunting techniques to different terrain and food sources. Less cover made ambush more difficult for the hunter, but it also made moving game easier to spot. A far-ranging hunter on horseback who knew what to look for usually could put meat in the pot. Instead of still hunting through the dense cover of acorn-laden oak forests as he had in the Southeast, he learned the art of spot and stalk and to accurately guess the range for longer rifle shots.

A day north of finding the dead Mexican hunters, Odell and Son scouted far to the west of the Prussian's force. They skirted the edge of a red-dusted, broken maze of badlands on their return. The day was hot and Odell badly wanted to take a drink, but his canteen was less than half full. He decided to emulate Son, and put a peeled chunk of prickly pear cactus in his mouth to keep it moist.

“Game gets scarcer the closer you get to the Llano except for buffler, and most of the shaggies are already gone north,” Son said. “We'd have done better to stay out of these breaks and to have hunted to the east.”

Odell squinted into the sun and scowled at the hard bit of tortured earth before him. “Hell must look a lot like those badlands to the west of us in summer, but I like that prairie country you've guided us through.”

Son wallowed his chunk of prickly pear around in his cheek like a chaw of tobacco and nodded lazily. “It's a shitty stretch of ground between here and the Llano if you're partial to good water. I've never brought anything back from that country but dust and an empty belly. I froze my pinkie toe off in a blizzard one winter on the head of the Brazos, and I reckon the little bone of it is still lying out there somewhere if the coyotes couldn't digest it.”

Son had managed to kill a mule deer buck, and they had a ten-mile ride back to the column. In Odell's mind, talking was the only thing to help pass the time. “I was thinking that a man could make a pretty good home back there before the Brazos forked.”

Son came out of his sleepy trance and looked at Odell like he was crazy. “It's a fair country if you can live like an Injun, but if you want to farm, you'd best go back where you came from.”

Odell wasn't one to let go of a thing once he got started, and he had spent too much time thinking about the prairie country just west of the Cross Timbers to be thwarted. “You might grow a little along the river, but farming ain't all a man can do with a piece of ground. Placido said those old Spanish priests down on the San Saba used to run cattle around their mission, and Manuel Ortega tells me that his kin raise cattle on far drier country south of the border.”

“Just what do you know about cattle? And besides, a cow is worth just barely more than a cold turd in Texas,” Son scoffed.

“Well, there are more folks moving to Texas every day, and maybe cows won't always be so cheap.”

Son's laugh was like the bray of a mule. “Kid, you figure out what to do with the Comanches and the buffalo, find somewhere with a market for beef, and maybe you could make a go of it.”

“The Prussian is always saying a businessman has to think ahead if he wants to get in on the beginnings of a coming thing.”

“You'll notice the Prussian still has the good sense to stay east of the frontier to make his money. That's where the people are,” Son said. “At the rate things are going it'll be another fifty years before you can live out here without getting yourself scalped, much less build a rancho.”

“I'd be there first,” Odell said stubbornly.

“If you want to start wearing a sombrero and big spurs you'd be better off to look at that cedar country down the Brazos and east of the Cross Timbers.”

“I like it farther west. The country suits me.”

“I don't know why I bother with you. Most times you're like talking to a rock.” Son tried to ride ahead and avoid any more conversation.

“My mama used to say that you had to follow your heart,” Odell said to Son's back.

Son twisted in his saddle to look back. “No offense to your mama, but I'd recommend following something safer like common sense. You'll live longer that way.”

“Sooner or later, we'll all die, and I reckon I'll go my own way until then.”

“I'm sure you will, but I would just as soon have that dying part later rather than sooner. There's no sense rushing things.” Son paused to cock one ear to the wind. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“You can't hear nothing with all your jabbering. I swore I just heard a fawn bleating,” Son said.

Odell hushed and the two of them listened until they both heard the sound again. It did sound like the bleat of a baby deer or an antelope in distress. The repeated cries were coming from the foot of a series of red, white-capped buttes on the far side of a deep gash in the ground west of them. The meat from the dead buck they were carrying wasn't going to make a dent in their party's hunger, and both of them headed off eagerly toward a chance at gathering a little more supper.

The periodic bleat of the fawn had grown louder by the time they traveled a quarter of a mile along the edge of the steep-sided canyon. They soon spotted a small bunch of antelope on the canyon floor at the foot of the far buttes some three hundred yards away. Both of them stopped their horses and tried to come up with a means of getting closer to their prey. The wind was at their faces, but they were sky-lined and to ride any closer was sure to run the animals off. The bleating continued and the pronghorns all had their heads raised and were working cautiously toward that sound.

“There's your fawn, and he's an ugly devil.” Son pointed slowly to a point much closer and below them.

Odell stood in his stirrups where he could look down over the lip of the canyon wall. The first thing he saw was Dub Harris kneeling behind a hump of ground and scraggly grass with his rifle pointed at the antelopes. He was doing his best imitation of a fawn's bleat to bring his quarry closer.

“That's a neat trick,” Son said quietly. “I never would have suspected it from Dub. He's as stout as a bull, but he ain't the sharpest tool in the shed.”

They sat still and watched Dub draw a bead on the antelope doe in the lead. His mimicry was about to get him an easy shot, and they would go down and help him skin out the meat once he made the kill. It was Odell who first saw the tawny streak bounding through the grass and rocks toward Dub's back.

The mountain lion was just as fooled as the antelope were, and his ears had it convinced that a tender young fawn lay hidden in the grass. The only thing that even gave Dub a fighting chance was the fact that his calling was so good that it had excited the big cat enough to start its charge from a distance instead of stalking close for a pounce. Dub heard his attacker coming at the last minute and fumbled to get his rifle around in time to defend himself.

The cougar was sixty yards away from Dub and closing impossibly fast when Odell finally shouldered his rifle. There was no time for careful aim, and he simply swung his gun barrel through the running cat and squeezed the trigger when its head appeared in his sights. The Bishop gun boomed and the cat crashed into Dub with the force of a freight train, knocking the powerful brawler off his feet.

“That was a hell of a shot.” Son hadn't even managed to get his own rifle from its saddle boot. “You're plumb quick when you want to be.”

“It wasn't much.” Odell was pleased, but he knew that a snapshot at a running target at better than a hundred yards had more to do with luck than it did with marksmanship.

The mountain lion must have twitched or shown some sign of life, because Dub jumped to his feet and fired another shot into it before beginning to beat the carcass with his rifle butt. Odell and Son rode along the rim until they found an eroded cut leading down into the canyon. Dub's horse was tied there, and they brought him along with them to where Dub stood over the dead lion. All three of the horses blew and shied nervously, refusing to get too close to a predator that was known to have a special love for horseflesh.

“Thanks, Son.” Somebody, sometime, had busted Dub's front teeth, and his smile was a snaggled thing.

“Don't thank me. It was Odell who shot that catamount off of you,” Son said.

Dub frowned at Odell but managed to mumble something that might have been faked gratitude. His attention quickly went back to the cat, and he studied it cautiously, as if it might come to life again. “I've never heard of a lion attacking a full-grown man in broad daylight.”

“He probably never saw you and was just homing in on what he thought was an injured fawn,” Odell said.

“Yeah.” Dub studied Odell. “He probably would've veered off when he saw me.”

“That's if he saw you. Haven't you ever seen a house cat stalking something it hears in the grass? They'll locate the sound and pounce without ever seeing what they're after,” Son said. “I don't figure he would've killed you, but Odell surely kept your backside from getting clawed up.”

Dub frowned at the lion. “This critter caused me to miss out on those antelopes, but I've heard you old-timers swear that panther meat is the best there is.”

Son tried to look serious, but a grin quickly spread across his mouth. “I've told that whopper myself, but the truth is, I've never tasted it.”

“Well, meat's been scarce as of late, so get down and help me load him,” Dub said.

“Odell's the one that shot the cat. I reckon the hide is his,” Son said.

The mountain lion was an exceptionally big tom, and it was plain that Dub didn't like the thought of Odell getting such a fine trophy. “There's two bullets in the cat, and one of them is mine.”

“You know better than that.” Son examined the carcass and pointed to where Odell's bullet had gone in one side of the cat's neck and out its throat on the other side, breaking its neck. “Dub, you just shot a dead lion, and made a poor shot at that.”

“Maybe that's the kid's bullet hole back there in its hip, and mine's the one through the neck,” Dub said belligerently.