Dead Man's Walk

Toward evening, they passed a solitary mountain—a lump of rock, mainly. Lady Carey rode off toward the mountain, to have a closer look. Despite many warnings about the Indians, she still darted off at will, now ahead and now behind. She took a keen interest in the desert plants and would sometimes dismount, with her sketch pad, and draw a cactus or a sage bush. Once or twice, she had galloped so far away that Call had ridden out, protectively, to be in a position to help if he needed to help. Lady Carey, though, made it clear that she did not welcome even the best-intentioned supervision.

“I’m not a chicken, Corporal Call,” she said to him once. “You needn’t act like a hen.“Gus felt a deep disquiet, not about Lady Carey but about the place. Looking at the high, rocky hump he suddenly realized that he had looked at it before—only before, he had been racing toward it from the east, in the hope of killing mountain sheep. Now they were coming toward it from the west—the sloping ridge the Comanches had hidden themselves behind was just ahead of them.

Call had the same recognition, at the same time. They had gone east from El Paso, and come back to the bluff where Josh Corn and Zeke Moody had been killed.

“I hope there ain’t no mountain sheep up there,” Gus said. “If there are, we’ll know they’re Comanches and that big one is somewhere around.”

“Maybe he’s still north,” Call said, remembering the day when the Comanches had walked their horses along the face of the Palo Duro Canyon.

“No, he ain’t north—I feel him,” Gus said.

“Now, that’s mush,” Call said. “You didn’t feel him the first time, and he was closer to us than I am to Willy.”

“I don’t say he’s close, but he’s somewhere around,” Gus said. “I feel funny in my stomach.”

“At least Major Chevallie would be proud of us if he could see us now,” Call said.

“Why would he?” Gus asked. “He never even made us corporals.”

“No, but now we’ve found the road to El Paso,” Call said. “It’s south of them high bluffs. If he was alive, he could start up a stagecoach line.”

Gus was still thinking about Buffalo Hump—how quickly he could strike. Lady Carey was almost out of sight, at the base of the mountain. If Buffalo Hump was close, even the fast gelding wouldn’t save her.

“Look at her,” Gus said, to Call. “If he was here, he’d get her.”

“Not just her,” Call said. “He’d get us all, if he was here.”

WHEN BUFFALO HUMP RODE into the trading place, the valley called the Sorrows, with his captives and the last group of Mexican horses, the old slaver, Joe Nibbs, was there waiting, with Sam Douglas and two wagons full of goods. A band of Kiowa had been there the day before, but they had only raided one settlement: the only captives they had to offer were a nine-year-old girl, and a little Negro boy. Joe Nibbs wouldn’t take the girl—she had a sickly look; very likely she would be dead within the month. Joe Nibbs had come west with the first trappers to leave St. Louis—he was too experienced a slaver to be wasting trade goods on a sickly girl.

Joe had been coming to the Sorrows for ten years; he had seen mothers kill themselves because he sold their children away; more than one husband had tried to kill him, because he had sold a wife. But Joe was a decisive man—he kept a hammer stuck in his belt and used it to dispatch troublesome captives quickly, silently, and cheaply. He knew where the human skull was weakest—he rarely had to strike twice, when he pulled his hammer. Bullets he normally saved for buffalo, or other game too big and too swift to be dispatched with a hammer. When the Kiowa arrived, with one sickly girl, Joe Nibbs upbraided them for laziness. The Texas settlements were creeping westward, up the Brazos and the Trinity. If the Kiowa didn’t want to make the long ride into Mexico for captives, they could at least be a little more active around the new settlements. Most of them weren’t really settlements anyway, just groups of scattered farms, always poorly defended. They ought to yield more than a sick girl and a small Negro boy.

In the wagons were blankets and beads, knives, mirrors, a few guns, and some harmless potions and powders that Joe passed off as medicine. He did not trade liquor. Life was risky enough on the Comancheria without pouring liquor into wild men skilled at every form of killing.

He traveled in the Indian lands with Sam Douglas, a youth of twenty-two, reedy but strong. He kept the wagons repaired and the captives secured. Sam had come from a whaling family, back in Massachusetts—he was so skilled with knots that in the three years he had been helping Joe Nibbs, not a single captive, male or female, had escaped. Sometimes, if the Comanche seemed restive, Sam would entertain them by tying intricate knots. Kicking Wolf was particularly fascinated by this skill—he would sit by Sam and encourage him to run through his whole repertory of knots; then he would want Sam to untie all his knots and tie them again, over and over.

Sam Douglas had grown up by the sea; he was used to cool, moist air. He had hated the West, with its sand and its dust, and had no fondness at all for Joe Nibbs, a greedy, profane, violent old man with black teeth, and a blacker heart. More than twenty times Sam had seen Joe Nibbs fly into a rage, yank out his hammer, and crack the skull of some man or woman who could perfectly well have been sold for a fine profit, if only Joe had been able to hold his temper. But Sam stayed with the old slaver because he was handicapped by a clubfoot and a harelip, both impediments to the satisfying of his considerable lust. In the settlements women shied from him, but traveling with a slaver solved that problem; there were always budding girls amid the captives, and sometimes grown women, too. Since it was Sam’s job to tie the women and to guard them, he had access to many females he could not have approached or succeeded with, had he met them in Massachusetts. Many of them writhed and squirmed, or begged and wept, or cursed and spat, while Sam was enjoying his access; but he paid no attention. They were slaves, and he was their slaver; they had to submit and most did, without him having to whack them or whip them or tie their legs to opposite sides of the wagon bed. Even if he had to beat the women a little, he was still kinder to them than Joe Nibbs. Joe was apt to whip them for no reason, or torment them with the handle of his hammer, or to tie them over a wagon wheel and rut at them from behind, like the rough old billy that he was.

The moment Buffalo Hump and Kicking Wolf rode into the Sorrows with their bunch of Mexican children, Sam noticed the girl, Rosa. Joe Nibbs noticed her, too. She had a beauty not often seen in captives.

“Why, he’s caught a pretty one,” Joe Nibbs said. “Them lazy Kiowas could ride for a year and not catch a girl that rare.”

“Let’s buy her, Joe,” Sam Douglas said. “Maybe the Apaches would buy her. They’d give us silver for her. They take lots of silver off them Mexicans they kill.”

What Sam was really thinking was that they would get to keep the girl for awhile. Old Joe could go first and rut at her from the back, if he wanted to. Then it would be Sam’s turn, and he might take it two or three times a night, under the pretense of seeing that the girl was properly bound.

“Ssh … hush about the Apaches,” Joe instructed. “Buffalo Hump hates everybody but his own tribe, and he don’t like too many of them. We don’t need to let on what we aim to do with this gal.”

They watched closely as the Comanche raiders rode down into the shallow valley—just a cleft between two ridges, really. In the distance, they could see a curve of the Rio Rojo. The wind was blowing hard from the north; spumes of sand curled over the lip of the ridge to the north and blew into the eyes of the Mexican captives. The Mexican children appeared to be well fed, Sam noted. Some of them were as plump as the little Negro boy who was tied in the first wagon. Several of the Mexican girls looked to be eight or nine years old—they could be used, if there was no one better, but Sam Douglas didn’t figure on having to drop that low, not if the wily Joe Nibbs could talk Buffalo Hump out of the young woman. Joe had bought captives from most of the major chiefs, north of the Santa Fe trail and south. He knew a route through the Carlsbad Mountains that allowed him to slip back and forth between Comanche and Apache, desert and plain. He was the oldest slaver on the plains, good at figuring out what a given Indian would take for a prize captive. The girl who rode behind Buffalo Hump, her wrists tied with a rawhide thong, was the prettiest woman to come up the Comanche war trail since Sam had been driving a wagon for Joe.