Dead Man's Walk

The canyon was there, though. They buried Roy Char hastily, and rode along the rim of the canyon until they found Gus and Bigfoot, hiding in a small declivity behind some thorny bushes. Both had their rifles at the ready.

“What took you all day?” Gus asked—he was badly annoyed by the fact that he had had to cower behind a bush for an hour, while he waited for Call to bring up the troop.

“I got an arrow in my arm, but it wasn’t as bad as what happened to a man we just buried,” Call said.

“You could be burying us—and you would have if we hadn’t been quick to hide,” Bigfoot told them. “There’s fifty or sixty Indians down below us—I wish you’d brought the whole troop.”

“Well, we can fetch the troop,” Caleb said. “I doubt those Indians can ride up this cliff and scalp us all.”

“No, but it’s their canyon,” Bigfoot reminded him. “They might know a trail.”

Caleb walked out on a little promontory, and looked down. He saw a good number of Indians, butchering buffalo. Six buffalo were down, at least.

“If they know a trail I hope they show it to us,” Caleb said, coming back. “We’d ride down and harvest a few of them buffalo ourselves.”

“There could be a thousand Indians around here,” Bigfoot said. “I ain’t putting myself in no place where I have to climb to get away from Indians. They might be better climbers than I am.”

“You’re right, but I hate to pass up the meat,” Caleb said.

Nonetheless, they did pass it up. The troop was brought forward and proceeded west, along the edge of the canyon. They were never out of sight of buffalo—or Indians. Quartermaster Brognoli, who believed in numbers—so many boots, so many rifles, so many sacks of flour—counted over three hundred tribesmen in the canyon, most of them engaged in cutting up buffalo. Call and Gus both kept looking into the canyon—the distance was so vast that it drew the eye. Both strained their eyes to see if they could spot Buffalo Hump, but they didn’t see him.

“He’s there, though,” Gus said. “I feel him.”

“You can’t feel an Indian who’s miles away,” Call said.

“I can,” Gus affirmed, without explanation.

“He could be five hundred miles from here—:there are thousands of Indians,” Call reminded him.

“I can feel him,” Gus insisted. “I get hot under the ribs when he’s around. Don’t you ever get hot under the ribs?”

“Not unless I’ve eaten putrid beef,” Call said. Twice on the trip he had eaten putrid beef, and his system had revolted.

The night was moonless, which worried Caleb Cobb somewhat and worried Bigfoot more. The horses were kept within a corral of ropes, and guard was changed every hour. Caleb called the men together in the evening, and made a little speech.

“We’ve come too far to go back,” he said. “We’re bound for Santa Fe. But the Indians know we’re here, and they’re clever horse thieves. We have to watch close. We won’t get across this long prairie if we lose our horses—the red boys will tag after us and pick us off like chickens.”

Despite the speech and the intensified guard, the remuda was twenty horses short when dawn came. None of the guards had nodded or closed an eye, either. Caleb Cobb was fit to be tied.

“How could they get off with twenty horses and not one of us hear them?” he asked. Brognoli kept walking around the horse herd, counting and recounting. For awhile he was sure the count was wrong—it wasn’t easy to count horses when they were bunched together. He counted and recounted until Caleb lost his temper and ordered him to stop.

“The damn horses are gone!” he said. “They’re forty miles away by now, most likely. You can’t count them because they’re gone!”

“I expect it was Kicking Wolf,” Bigfoot said. “He could steal horses out of a store.”

“If I could catch the rascal I’d tie him to a horse’s tail and let the horse kick him to death,” Caleb said. “Since his name is Kicking Wolf it would be appropriate if the son of a bitch got kicked to death.”

With the night’s theft, the horse situation became critical. Three men were totally without mounts, and no man had more than one horse. To make matters worse, Tom, Matilda’s big grey, was one of the horses that had been stolen. She was now afoot. Matilda cried all morning. She had a fondness for Tom. The sight of Matilda crying unnerved the whole camp. Since taking up with Shadrachr

Matilda had raged less—everyone noted her mildness. But watching such a large woman cry was a trial to the spirit. It fretted Shadrach so that he grew restless and rode out of camp, over Matilda’s protests.

“Now he’ll go off and get killed,” Matilda said.

“Well, if you hush up that crying, maybe he’ll come back,” Long Bill said. He was one of the men who was afoot, and as a result, was in a sour mood. The prospect of walking to Santa Fe, across such a huge plain, did not appeal to him—but the thought of walking back to Austin didn’t appeal to him, either. He had seen what had just happened to the mining man, Roy Char. He was determined to stay with the troop, even if it meant blisters on his feet.

Call and Gus had both been on guard, in the darkest part of the night. Call felt shamed by the thought that he had not been keen enough to prevent the theft.

“Why, I wasn’t sleepy a bit,” Gus said. “It couldn’t have happened on our watch. I can hear a rat move, when I’m that wide awake.”

“You might could hear a rat, but you didn’t hear the Indians and you didn’t hear the horses leaving, either,” Call told him.

That night Call, Bigfoot, and a number of other guards periodically put their ear to the ground to listen. All they heard was the tramp of their own horses in the rope corral. In addition to the rope, most of the horses had been hobbled, so they couldn’t bolt. . Call and Gus had the watch just before sunrise. They moved in circles around the herd, meeting every five minutes. Call was certain no Indians were there. It was only when dawn came that he had a moment of uncertainty. He saw the beginnings of the sunrise—the light was yellow as flame. But the yellow light was in the west, and dawn didn’t come from the west.

A second later Bigfoot saw it too, and yelled loud enough to wake the whole camp.

“That ain’t the sunrise, boys!” he yelled.

Just as he said it, Call saw movement to the north. Two Indians had sneaked in and slipped the hobbles on several horses. Call threw off a shot, but it was still very dark—he could no longer see anything to the north.

“Damn it all, they got away again,” he said. “I don’t know how many horses they got away with, this time.““Don’t matter now, we’ve got to head back to that last creek,” Bigfoot said.

“Why?” Call asked, startled.

Bigfoot merely pointed west, where the whole horizon was yellow.

“That ain’t sunrise,” he said, in a jerky voice. “That’s fire.”

THE TROOP HAD NO sooner turned to head back south toward the little creek Bigfoot mentioned when they saw the same yellow glow on the prairie south of them. The flames to the west were already noticeably closer. Bigfoot wheeled his mount, and rode up to Caleb.

“They set it,” he said. “The Comanches. They waited till the wind was right. Now we have the canyon at our backs and prairie fires on two sides.”

“Three,” Caleb said, pointing west, where there was another fierce glow.

The whole troop immediately discerned the nature of their peril. Call looked at Gus, who tried to appear nonchalant.

“We’ll have to burn or we’ll have to jump,” Call said. “I hate the thought of burning most, I guess.”

Gus looked into the depths of the canyon—he was only twenty feet from its edge. The prairie now was a great ring of burning grass. Though he sat calmly on his horse, waiting for Bigfoot and the Colonel to decide what to do, inside he felt the same deep churning that he had felt beyond the Pecos. The Indians were superior to them in their planning. They would always lay some clever trap.