Dead Man's Walk

Of course, the young braves did not manage to catch the cougar. Their horses were a little tired, from the swift raid. The cougar outran them easily.

Later that day, Kicking Wolf appeared. Buffalo Hump was angry with him, for missing the raid, but they had taken so many horses and so many captives that he didn’t bother complaining. Kicking Wolf was a very contrary man—he did as he pleased. He told Buffalo Hump he had decided to wait for them on the trail, because he was enjoying the feeling he had after torturing Kirker to death.

It was a feeling of great power and calm, Kicking Wolf said. He didn’t want to lose it just to catch a few Mexican children and run off a few horses. He explained that he had tortured Kirker for another day, after they hung him over the fire. After Kirker died, Kicking Wolf cut off all of his fingers—he meant to take them to the main camp and make them into a necklace. The fingers of the scalp hunter should not be wasted.

When Kicking Wolf saw Rosa, the Mexican girl, he became immediately jealous. He began to wish he had taken time to go on part of the raid. His only wife was old and smelly—Buffalo Hump had three young wives already, too many, in Kicking Wolf’s view. He was a lustful man and could only watch enviously when Buffalo Hump went to the girl and took her. He ought to have gone to Mexico and taken a girl himself—it was only that he had been patiently torturing Kirker and didn’t want to lose the feeling of great peace that came to him when the scalp hunter died.

“It’s A LURCHY WAY to travel, if you ask me,” Call said. “It’s still a long way to Galveston and we ain’t near through the Comanche country, yet. Why is she stopping, just to paint a hill?”

“You can’t rush a lady like her, Woodrow,” Gus said. He, too, thought it was eccentric of Lady Carey to stop the trip for a whole day, just so she could paint the colours of a desert sunset as they appeared on the line of bluffs to the north. They had happened to be traveling below a kind of rim-rock the day before, and had camped just at sunset. Lady Carey had not been able to get her easel and her paint-brushes out in time to capture the colours of rose and gold that the sun threw on the cliffs.

“Why, there’s nothing like it in the world,” she said. “I must paint —Willy, you might try, too. We’ll wait until tomorrow and both have a go at it.”

“That’s a good plan—I’m tired of my pony,” Willy said.

Gus had managed to shoot an antelope that afternoon; he was immensely proud of himself. Emerald, the Negress, walked out and butchered the animal, very precisely and in half the time it would have taken Gus. Before they could even set Lady Carey’s tent up properly, Emerald returned with the best cuts of antelope. That night she cooked what she referred to as the saddle, with some corn and a few chilies they had brought from El Paso. Gus thought it was the best meal he had ever eaten; Call had to admit it was mighty tasty. Emerald had struck up a friendship with Matilda Roberts— she showed Matilda some of the finer points of cooking game. Lady Carey had a little chest containing nothing but salts and peppers, spices, and herbs. While Emerald cooked, Lady Carey sang, plucking her mandolin. That evening the great boa, Elphinstone, was let out of its basket. It curled around Lady Carey’s shoulders, as she sang.

Call thought Lady Carey fearless to the point of folly. She ordered no guard, but he and Gus and Long Bill stood one anyway, taking turns through the chilly nights. Wesley Buttons was exempt from guard duty—it was well known that he could not stay awake even ten minutes, unless someone was talking to him, and Wesley’s conversation was so dull that no one wanted to attempt to talk to him through the night. He was put in charge of the saddling and packing instead; Call and Gus usually helped him take down Lady Carey’s tent.

During the day of rest, while they waited for the sunset colours to come, Lady Carey amused herself by sketching the Rangers. She drew quickly, and made such good likenesses of the men that it startled all of them. None of them felt that his own sketch was quite accurate, but contended that Lady Carey had captured the other men perfectly.

Toward evening, as the sun sank, the cliffs to the north reddened. Lady Carey prepared her colours and began to paint. Willy, the young viscount, had a small easel; his attempts at capturing the sunset were done in watercolour. Matilda stood beside Lady Carey, watching. Seeing the red cliffs form on the canvas fascinated her, much as the stories had. She had never known anyone who could do such things.

Lady Carey painted until nightfall, but Willy tired of art and walked off with Gus, in search of game. He had a small fowling piece, and would pop away at anything that moved; this evening, though, nothing moved. Willy wanted to keep looking, but as theshadows lengthened, Gus grew apprehensive and insisted that they return to camp. They had seen nothing to provoke unease, but Gus knew how quickly that could change, in such a wild place.

“There could be an Indian not fifty feet from us,” he told Willy.

“But if there’s an Indian I want to see him,” Willy said. “Why can’t you find him and show him to me?”

“If I found an Indian I wouldn’t have to show him to you,” Gus told him. “He’d be shooting arrows at us quicker than you can think. If I didn’t kill the Indian, he’d kill us.”

“Of course, you would kill him, I’m sure,” Willy said, moving a little closer to Gus as they walked toward camp.

Call was prepared for an early start, and was up before sunrise— but to his surprise, Lady Carey had risen ahead of him. She was standing beside her easel, waiting for the first light from the east.

“I know you’re restless, Corporal Call,” she said. “I painted the sunset—now I want to paint the dawn. Go and ask Emerald to cook the bacon.”

It was almost midday before Lady Carey was content to pack up her easel and her oils and mount the black gelding.

For three days more they moved eastward, past the line of the rim-rock but not beyond the desert or the mountains. On the afternoon of the third day, Call, Gus, and Long Bill all began to feel uneasy. There was no reason for their unease, yet they had it. Call debated scouting ahead, to see if he could detect any sign of Indians; in the end he decided against it. There were only the four of them to fight, in case of attack, and Wesley Buttons was a notably unreliable shot, at that. It was probably better to stay together, in case of trouble.

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.”