Dead Man's Walk

“Yes, I expect so,” Caleb said. “They wanted that buffalo bad.”

“Should we go get them, sir?” Long Bill asked. “Their horses are about worn out.”

“No, let them go, maybe they’ll starve,” Caleb said. “If I send a troop after them, they’ll just kill half of it and steal themselves fresh horses.”

Shadrach was annoyed all day because no one had shot the Comanches.

“Bes-Das should have shot them, he seen them first,” he said. “Bigfoot must have been drunk, else he would have shot ‘em.”

Shadrach had begun to repeat himself—it worried Matilda Roberts.

“You say the same things, over and over, Shad,” she told him, but Shadrach went right on repeating himself. Over and over he told her the story of how he saved himself in a terrible blizzard on the Platte: he killed a large buffalo cow, cut her open, and crawled inside; the cow’s body stayed warm long enough to keep him alive.

Matilda didn’t want to think of Shadrach inside a buffalo cow. Sam butchered the one the two Comanches had chased into camp; he made blood sausage of the buffalo blood, but Matilda didn’t eat any. Shad’s story was too much on her mind.

That night, lying with the old man as he smoked his long pipe, Matilda held his rough hand. The plains scared her—she wanted to be close to Shadrach. Since crossing the Brazos, she had begun to realize that she was tired of being a whore. She was tired of having to walk off in the bushes with her quilt because some Ranger had a momentary lust. Besides, there were no bushes anymore. Whoring on the prairies meant going over a hill or a ridge, and there could always be a Comanche over the hill or the ridge.

Besides, she had come to have such a fondness for Shadrach that she had no interest in going with other men, and in fact didn’t like it. Shad’s joints ached at times, from too many blizzards on the Platte and too many nights sleeping wet. He groaned and moaned in his sleep. Matilda knew he needed her warmth, to ease his joints.

Shadrach had become so stiff that he could not reach down to pull his boots on and pull them off. Matilda faithfully pulled them off for him. No woman had been so kind before, and it touched him. He had begun to get surly when a Ranger with an interest in being a customer approached Matilda now.

“Would you ever get hitched, Shad?” Matilda asked, the night after the buffalo ran through camp.

“It would depend on the gal,” Shadrach said.

“What if I was the gal?” Matilda asked. It was a bold question, but she needed to know.

Shadrach smiled. He knew of Matilda’s fondness for him, and was flattered by it. After all, he was old and woolly, and the camp was full of young scamps, some of them barely old enough to have hair on their balls.

“You—what would you want with me?” he asked, to tease her. “I’m an old berry. My pod’s about dry.”

“I’d get hitched with you anyway, Shad,” Matilda said.

Shadrach had been married once, to a Cree beauty on the Red River of the north. She had been killed in a raid by the Sioux, some forty years back. All he remembered about her was that she made the tastiest pemmican on the Northern plains.

“Why, Matty, I thought you had the notion to go to California,” Shadrach said. “I’ve not got that much traveling in me, I don’t expect. I’ve done been west to the Gila and that’s far enough west for me.”

“They’ll have a train to California someday,” Matilda said. “I’ll wait, and we’ll take the train. Until then I guess New Mexico will do, if it ain’t too sandy.”

“I’d get hitched with you—sure,” Shadrach said. “Maybe we’ll run into a preacher, somewhere up the trail.”

“If we don’t, we could ask the Colonel to hitch us,” Matilda said.

A little later, when the old man was sleeping, Matilda got up and sneaked two extra blankets out of the baggage wagon. The dews had been exceptionally heavy at night. She didn’t want her husband-to-be getting wet on the dewy ground.

Black Sam saw her take the blankets. He used a chunk of firewood for a pillow, himself. Sometimes, when the fire burned low, he would turn over and burn his pillow.

“I need those blankets, Sam-don’t tell,” Matilda said. She was fond of Sam too, though in a different way.

“I won’t, Miss Matty,” Sam said.

IN TWO WEEKS THE beeves were gone, and the troop was living on mush. The expedition had pointed to the northwest, and came to a long stretch of rough, bald country that led upward to a long escarpment. Though the escarpment was still fifty miles away, they could see it.

“What’s up there?” Gus asked Bigfoot. “Comanches,” Bigfoot said. “Them and the Kiowa.” The tall boy, Jimmy Tweed, had begun to bunk with Call and Gus. Jimmy and Gus were soon joshing each other and trying to outdo each other in pranks or card tricks. They would have tried to beat each other at whoring, but all the whores except Matilda had turned back at the Brazos, and Matilda had retired. So desperate was the situation that a youth from Navasota named John Baca was caught having congress with his mare. The troop laughed about it for days; Johnny Baca blushed every time anyone looked at him. But many of the men, in the privacy of their thoughts, wondered if Johnny Baca had not made a sensible move. Brognoli, the quartermaster, merely shrugged tolerantly at the notion of a boy having congress with a mare.

“Why not?” he asked. “The mare don’t care.”

“She may not care, but I’ll be damned if I’ll go with a horse,” Gus said.

“Besides, I don’t own a mare,” he added, a little later.

The complete disappearance of the great buffalo herd continued to puzzle everyone. Call, Gus, and Bes-Das scouted as much as thirty miles ahead, and yet not an animal could be found.

“No wonder them Comanches run that one cow right into camp,” Gus said on the third evening, when they sat down to a supper of mush. “It was that or starve, I guess.”

“It’s a big prairie,” Bigfoot reminded him. “Those buffalo could be three or four hundred miles north, by now.”

Not long before they spotted the escarpment they came upon a stream that Bes-Das thought was the Red, the river they counted on to take them west to New Mexico. Bes-Das was the scout who was supposed to be most familiar with the Comanche country— everyone felt relieved when they struck the river. It seemed they were practically to New Mexico. The water was bad, though—not as bad as the Pecos, in Call’s view, but bad enough that most of the troop was soon bothered with cramps and retchings. The area proved to be unusually snaky, too. The low, shaley hills were so flush with snakes that Call could sometimes hear three or four rattling at the same time.

Before they had been on the river half a day, Elihu Carson, the dentist, walked off to squat awhile, in the grip of a series of cramps, and had the bad luck to get bitten in the ass by a rattlesnake. Several men testified that they had heard the snake rattle, but Elihu Carson was a little deaf—he didn’t hear the warning.

“I think you’re cursed, Carson,” the Colonel said, when informed of the accident. “First you trip on your suitcase and get stickers in your face, and now you have fangs in your ass.”

“Sir, everything is sharp in this part of the country,” the dentist said.

Most of the men expected Carson to die of snakebite, and those he had extracted teeth from hoped that he would. But Elihu Carson confounded them. He showed only brief ill effects—four hours after the bite, he was pulling one of young Tommy Spencer’s teeth.The boy from Missouri had let a horse kick him right in the face, and had two broken front teeth to show for his carelessness.

Later that day, the mules pulling the main supply wagon spooked at a cougar that bounded out of a little clump of bushes right in front of them. Gus and several others blazed away at the cougar, but the cat got clean away. The mules fled down a gully, pulling the heavy wagon: it struck a rock, turned completely over in the air, and burst apart. One of the wheels came off its axle and rolled on down the gully out of sight. Caleb Cobb’s canoe, which had been on top of the load, smashed to bits. One mule broke its leg and had to be shot.