Dead Man's Walk

With difficulty, Caleb mastered himself. He turned the musket over, as if he meant to hand it back to the soldier he had borrowed it from. But then, in a whipping motion too quick for anyone to stop, he struck with the stock of the musket across both of Call’s bound feet. The blow was so sudden and painful that Call cried out. Caleb immediately handed the musket back to the soldier he had borrowed it from, and hobbled back toward the buggy.

Call twisted in pain—through the legs of his captors he could see the buggy being righted. The horses, still jumpy, were being held by three men each. General Dimasio stood by the buggy, talking to Captain Salazar. Now and then, the General gestured toward Call. The company barber had been hastily summoned, to pick the glass out of Caleb’s face and neck. The barber wiped the blood away with a rag as best he could, but several cuts were still bleeding freely— he took the rag from the barber and dabbed at the cuts himself.

General Dimasio climbed back into the buggy, and Caleb after him. The canopy was sitting a little crookedly. The driver had survived; he turned the buggy, and the eight cavalrymen fell in behind it again, as it left the camp.

The buggy went at a good clip—soon the General and Caleb Cobb were nearly to the mountains.

Captain Salazar strolled over and stood looking down at Call, who was still surrounded by soldiers ready to bayonet him if he gave them an excuse.

“You are a brave young man, but foolish,” Salazar said. “Your Colonel had no choice but to surrender. His men had no food and no ammunition. If he hadn’t surrendered, we would have killed you all.”

“I despise him,” Call said. “At least he won’t look so pretty at his damn banquet.”

“You’re right about that,” Salazar said. “But the governor’s wife will enjoy him anyway. She likes adventurers.”

“I despise him,” Call said, again.

“I’m afraid you will not look so good either, once we have whipped you,” Salazar said. “The General admired your mettle so much that he ordered one hundred lashes for you—a great honor.”

Call looked at Captain Salazar, but said nothing. His feet still pained him badly. He had supposed there would be more punishment coming, too. After all, he had knocked the fat General out of his fancy buggy, turned the buggy over, caused the driver to get partly crushed by a wagon wheel, and bent the canopy of the buggy out of shape.

“Fifty lashes is usually enough to kill a man, Corporal,” Captain Salazar went on. “You will have to eat heartily before this punishment, if you hope to live.”

“Why would I need to eat, especially?” Call asked.

“Because you won’t have any flesh left on your ribs,” the Captain said. “The whip will take it off.”

Then he smiled at Call again, and turned away.

Gus WAS WALKING UP the little slope toward the Ranger troop when suddenly a cheer went up. He looked up to see that the men were all waving their guns and hooting. At first he thought they were merely welcoming him back—but when he looked more closely, he saw that they were looking beyond him, toward the Mexican camp.

He turned to see what the commotion was about and saw that the General’s buggy had been overturned, somehow—at first he supposed it was merely some accident with the horses. Good buggy horses were often too high strung to be reliable.

When he saw there was a melee, and that Call was in the middle of it, his stomach turned over. Call was in the overturned buggy, pounding at Caleb Cobb. Then he saw a soldier bayonet Call in the leg—several more soldiers had their bayonets up, ready to stab Call when they could. Gus didn’t want to watch, but was unable to turn away. He knew his friend-would be dead in a few seconds.

But then, to Gus’s surprise, Salazar stepped in and stopped the stabbing. He saw Caleb come over and strike at Call with the musket stock. Why he struck his feet, rather than his head, Gus couldn’t figure. He began to walk backward, up the ridge, so he could continue to watch the drama in the Mexican camp. Salazar came back and seemed to be having a talk with Call, while Call lay on the ground. Gus didn’t know what any of it meant. All he could be sure of was that Caleb Cobb then left the camp with General Dimasio. Call was tied up—no doubt he was in plenty of trouble for attacking the General’s buggy.

He soon gave up walking backward—the ground was too rough. The boys were close by, anyway—some were coming down the ridge to meet him. The Mexican infantry stood in a ring around them, just out of rifle range.

“So what’s the orders, why did Caleb leave?” Bigfoot asked, when Gus walked up to the troop.

“The orders are to surrender our weapons,” Gus said. “Call didn’t like them—I guess that’s why he knocked over that buggy.”

“Well, he was bold,” Bigfoot said. “I expect they’ll put him up against the wall of a church, like they did Bes.”

“They would have already, only there’s no church available,” Blackie Slidell said.

“Where did Caleb bounce off to, with that fat general?” Bigfoot asked.

Gus didn’t know the answer to that question, or to most of the questions he was asked. He couldn’t get his mind off the fact that Woodrow Call was probably going to be executed, and very soon. He had never had a friend as good as Woodrow Call—it was in his mind that he should have stayed and fought with him, and been killed too, side by side with his friend.

“Caleb is a damn skunk,” Long Bill Coleman said. “He had no right to surrender for us—what if we’d rather fight?”

“What happens if we do surrender?” Jimmy Tweed asked. “Will they put all of us up against a church?”

“Oh, they’d need two churches, at least, for all of us,” Bigfoot said. “That church where they shot Bes was no bigger than a hut. They’d have to shoot us in shifts, if they used a church that small.”

“Shut up about the churches, they ain’t going to shoot us,” Gus said. He was annoyed by Bigfoot’s habit of holding lengthy discus-sions of ways they might have to die. If he had to be dead, he wanted it to occur with less conversation from Bigfoot Wallace.

“We can have breakfast, as soon as we give up our guns,” he added.

To the hungry men, cold, wet, and discouraged, the notion of breakfast was a considerable inducement to compromise.

“I wonder if they’ve got bacon?” Jimmy Tweed asked. “I might surrender to the rascals if I could spend the morning eating bacon.”

“There’s no pigs over there,” Matilda observed. “I guess they could have brought bacon with them, though.”

“What do you think, Shad?” Bigfoot asked.

Shadrach had picked up a little, at the prospect of battle. There was a keen light in his eyes that had been missing since he got his cough and had begun to repeat himself in his conversations. He was walking back and forth in front of the troop, his long rifle in his hand. The fact that they were completely surrounded by Mexican infantry, with a substantial body of cavalry backing them up, was not lost on him, though. He kept looking across the plain and then to the mountains beyond. The plain offered no hope. It was entirely open; they would be cut down like rabbits. But the mountains were timbered. If they could make it to cover, they might survive.

The problem with that strategy was that the Mexican camp lay directly between them and the hills. They would have to fight their way through the infantry, then through the cavalry, then through the camp. Several men were sickly, and the ammunition was low. Much as he wanted to sight his long rifle time after time at Mexican breasts, he knew it would be a form of suicide. They were too few, with too little.

“We could run for them hills—shoot our way through,” he said. “I doubt more than five or six of us would make it. We’d give them a scrap, at least, if we done that.”