Dead Man's Walk

Sam handed him a little packet of biscuits, and some meat.

“Thank you,” Goodnight said. “These young ladies have been too scared to eat. But they ain’t hurt—I expect they’ll get hungry one of these days.”

“They’re pretty girls—I hope they eat,” Sam said. “I have a little jelly saved—plum jelly. Maybe it will tempt them.”

He handed Goodnight a small jar of jelly—Goodnight looked at it and put it in his saddlebag.

“If it don’t tempt the young ladies it will sure tempt me,” he said. Then he looked again at Caleb Cobb.

“If you make the Red and any of them wagons still have the wheels on them, stick to the river and follow it west. There’s a place called the Narrows, where you might get through.““Angosturas,” Alchise said, nodding.

“Yes, that’s what the Mexicans call it,” Goodnight said. “I call it the Narrows.”

Then he tipped his hat to Matilda a third time. *‘Let’s go, Bose,” he said.

Soon the cloud of dust from the twenty horses was floating over the gullies to the south. >

“Charlie Goodnight’s salty,” Bigfoot observed.

“I agree,” Caleb said.

CALEB COBB RODE ALONE most of that day, accompanied only by his Irish dog. If he was disturbed to discover that he was not on the river he thought he was on, he didn’t express it. Nonetheless, the troop was uneasy. There was little talk. Each man rode along, alone with his thoughts. Gus tried once or twice to discuss the situation with Call, but Call didn’t answer. He was trying to push down the feeling that the whole expedition was foolish. They didn’t even know which river they were on, and their commander’s estimation of the distance they had to travel was off by hundreds of miles. They had already lost several men and most of their wagons; they had killed and eaten the last of their beeves. If there was any game in the area, no one could spot it.

“I despise poor planning,” he said.

Gus, though, was feeling frisky. He could not stay in low spirits long, not when the day was fine and the country glorious.

“Why, you can see a hundred miles, if you stand up in your stirrups,” he said. “I prefer it to the trees, myself.

“For one thing, Indians can hide in the trees,” he added.

“They hid pretty well out beyond the Pecos, and there wasn’t no trees out there,” Call reminded him. “There could be a hundred of them watching us right now and you’ll never see them.”

“Oh, shut up, you always think the worst,” Gus said, annoyed by his friend’s pessimistic nature. All he wanted to do was enjoy a fine afternoon on the prairies. He did not want to have to consider that there might be a hundred Indians in hiding in the next gully, or any gully. All he wanted was to enjoy the gallop out to New Mexico—it took the pleasure out of adventure to always be worrying, as his friend did.

Call was not the only one in the company who was worried, though. That night Bes-Das and Alchise disappeared, taking six horses.

“I guess they didn’t want to be shot down like Falconer was,” Bigfoot said. “Caleb’s too quick to flare. It ain’t good leading to be shooting down people we might need.”

“I don’t guess we’re any worse off than we were,” Long Bill pointed out. “Those two were lost anyway. That fellow Goodnight is about the only man who knows his way around, out in these parts.”

Two more wagons were lost between the Prairie Dog Fork of the Brazos and the wide pans of the Red River. Caleb put all the ammunition in the one wagon and told the men to keep only such gear as they could carry on their horses. That night they ate catfish—the river was low and some of the fish were trapped in shallow ponds. The men sharpened willow sticks into crude spears. More than fifty sizable fish were taken, cooked, and devoured, and yet the men went to bed unsatisfied.

“Eating fish is like eating air,” Jimmy Tweed observed. “It goes in but it don’t fill you up.”

Once they passed through the Narrows the great plain spread west before them. Though they had been on the prairie for weeks, none of them were prepared for the way the sky and the earth seemed to widen, once they rose onto the Llano Estacado. After a day or two on the llano the meaning of distance seemed changed. The great plain, silent and endless, became the world. In relation to the plain, they felt like ants. The smaller world of towns andcreeks and clumps of forest seemed difficult to remember. At night on the llano, with the sky a star-strewn plain of darkness overhead, Gus tried to keep Clara in mind, but the thought that he had fallen in love with a girl, in a dusty little general store in Austin, had come to seem far away and insubstantial, like the dust motes that had floated down the sunbeams in the store. The girl and the store had been for the day—the great plain was forever.

The whole troop was dismayed by the stretch of empty land ahead. If the Indians fell upon them when they were on the llano, what chance could they have?

Bigfoot had been made chief of scouts. He took Gus and Call with him when he rode out every day. Gus he took mainly for his eyesight. It was generally acknowledged that Gus could see farther and more accurately than anyone in the troop. Call he took for his steadiness; Call didn’t flinch from trouble.

On their third day on the plain, they saw that there was a difference in the horizon ahead. None of them, though, could puzzle the difference out. The clouds seemed closer to the surface of the ground. Gus was the first to note something strange: not far ahead, a hawk had dived at a rabbit or a quail, and yet the hawk didn’t swoop on its prey and lift it. The hawk kept going, as if it had dived into a hole.

Ten minutes later they came to the lip of the Palo Duro Canyon, and the mystery was explained. The hawk hadn’t dived into a hole; it had dived into the canyon, which looked to be several miles across, and so many miles long that they couldn’t see the western end of it. Hundreds of feet below them buffalo were feeding in long grass.

“Hurrah, we found the bufs,” Gus said. “Let’s climb down and shoot some—maybe the Colonel will promote us.”

“He won’t, because you’ll break your neck going down, and even if you don’t you’ll never get back up, not carrying no buffalo meat,” Bigfoot said.

“I’ve heard about this canyon,” he said, a little later. “I just had no idea we were close by.”

He sent Call racing back to inform the company—he and Gus stayed, to explore the canyon wall and see if there was a way down. The sight of the grazing buffalo reminded him that he was hungryfor meat—mush and Red River catfish didn’t fill you like buffalo ribs.

While loping southeast toward the camp they had just left not long before, Call’s horse suddenly jumped sideways, so violently that Call lost his seat and was thrown high and hard. He managed to hang on to his bridle rein, but he landed on his head and shoulders so hard that his vision blurred for a moment. As it cleared he saw something white, nearby. In a moment, he realized that the white thing that had spooked his horse was the body of a man. At first he thought it might be one of the Rangers, out for a ride or a hunt. The man had been shot, scalped, stripped, and mutilated. Someone had hacked into his chest cavity and taken out his vitals. Call looked closely at the face, which was the face of a stranger. He didn’t think it belonged to anyone in the troop. The man had not a stitch of clothes on. There was no way to identify him. Call felt his neck, which was cold.

Even so, his killer or killers might be close by. Call drew his pistol, just in case, and mounted cautiously. Just as he did he saw movement out of the corner of his eye: three Comanches and their horses seemed to rise up, out of the bare earth, only a hundred yards away. Call spurred his horse, and bent low as she raced. He knew his only chance was to run. To his relief, Buffalo Hump was not one of his pursuers. The troop was probably not more than five miles back, and he was on Betsy, a fleet sorrel mare. Betsy was one of the fastest horses in camp, and her wind was excellent. Yet before he had been running a minute, Call realized that the Comanches were gaining. Their horses were no faster than Betsy, but they knew the land better—it was the same thing he had felt west of the Pecos. They took advantage of every roll and dip. The lead warrior had a bow and arrow, and he was closing. To his left Call spotted something he had seen on the way up: a large prairie-dog town. Without hesitation he pointed Betsy toward it. It was a risk—the mare might step in one of the holes, in which case it would all be over, but it was a risk for the Comanches, too. Maybe they would slow down —he himself had no intention of slowing. If luck was with him he might race through the town and gain a few yards. He had to try it.