Dead Man's Walk

Ezekiel Moody had the same thought. He was ru

Yet he was afraid to stop ru

Then abruptly Zeke changed his mind and gave up. He stopped and tried to yank out his pistol and shove it against his eyeball, as Bigfoot had instructed. He knew the Indian on the bloody horse was almost on him—he knew he had to be quick.

But when he got his pistol out, he turned to glance at the charging Indian, and the pistol dropped out of his sweaty hand. Before he could stoop for it the horse and the Indian were there: he had failed; he was caught.

Buffalo Hump reached down and grabbed the terrified boy by his long black hair. He yanked his horse to a stop, lifted Zeke Moody off his feet, and slashed at his head with a knife, just above the boy’s ears. Then he whirled and raced across the front of the huddled Rangers, dragging Zeke by the hair. As the horse increased its speed, the scalp tore loose and Zeke fell free. Buffalo Hump had whirled again, and held aloft the bloody scalp. Then he turned and rode away slowly, at a walk, to show his contempt for the marksmanship of the Rangers. The bloody scalp he still held high.

Ezekiel Moody stumbled through the sage and cactus, screaming from the pain of his ripped scalp. So much blood streamed over his eyes that he couldn’t see. He wanted to go back and find his pistol, so he could finish killing himself, but Buffalo Hump had dragged him far from where he had dropped the pistol. He could scarcely see, for blood. Zeke was in too much pain to retrace his steps. All he could do was stumble along, screaming in pain at almost every step.

Shadrach sighted on the Comanche with the big hump, as Buffalo Hump rode away. Then he raised his barrel a bit before he fired. It was an old buffalo hunter’s trick, but it didn’t work. Buffalo Hump was out of range, and Zeke Moody was scalped and screaming from pain.

“Ain’t nobody going to go get Zeke?” Matilda asked. The boy’s screams affected her—she had begun to cry. In peaceful times, back in San Antonio, Zeke had sometimes sat and played the harmonica to her.

“Somebody needs to help that boy, he’s bad hurt,” she said.

“Matilda, he’ll find his way here—once he gets a little closer we’ll go carry him in,” the Major said. “He oughtn’t to have left the troop —if young Corn hadn’t, he might be alive.”

The Major was a good deal a

“Well, this is merry,” Bigfoot said. “We’ve been ru

“Now, he didn’t cut Zeke’s head off, just his hair,” Bob Bascom corrected. He was of a practical bent and did not approve of inaccurate statements, however amusing they might be.

“Zeke will have to keep his hat on this winter, I expect,” Bigfoot said. “He’s go

“He don’t scare me, he’s just a boy,” Matilda said. She was disgusted with the inaction of the men—so disgusted that she started walking out to help Zeke herself.

“Hold up, Matty, we don’t need you getting killed too,” the Major said.

Matilda ignored him. She had never liked fat officers, and this one was so fat he had difficulty getting his prod out from under his belly when he visited her. In any case, she had never allowed soldiers, fat or otherwise, to give her orders.

Call and Gus knelt together, keeping a tight hold on the bridle reins of their two horses. Both of them could see Zeke, whose whole face and body were red.

“I expect he’ll die from that scalping,” Call said. “I didn’t know people had that much blood in them,” Gus said. “I thought we was mostly bone inside.”

Call didn’t admit it, but he had the same belief; but from what he had seen that morning, it seemed that people were really just sacks of blood with legs and arms stuck on them.

“Keep close to me,” Gus said. “There might be some more of them sneaking devils around here close.”

“I am close to you,” Call said, still thinking about the blood. Now and again, working for the old blacksmith, he had cut himself, sometimes deeply, on a saw blade or a knife. But what he had seen in the last few minutes was different. The ground where Josh had been killed was soaked, as if from a red rain. It reminded him of the area behind the butcher stall in San Antonio, where beeves and goats were killed and hung up to drain. Now there was Zeke, a healthy man only a few minutes ago,staggering around with his scalp torn off. Call knew that if Buffalo Hump had been a few steps faster when he was chasing Gus, Gus would look like Josh or Zeke.

In San Antonio every man on the street, whether they were famous Indian fighters like Bigfoot, or just farmers in for supplies, told stories of Indian brutalities—Call had long known in his head that Indian fighting on the raw frontier between the Brazos and the Pecos was bloody and violent. But hearing about it and seeing it were different things. Rangering was supposed to be adventure, but this was not just adventure. This was struggle and death, both violent. Hearing about it and seeing it happen were different things.

“We’ll have to be watching every minute now,” Gus said. “We can’t just lope off anymore, looking for pigs to shoot. We have to be watching. These Indians are too good at hiding.”

Call knew it was true. He had glanced over at Josh Corn just as Josh was taking his pants down to shit, and had seen nothing at all that looked worrisome—just a few sage bushes. And yet the same humpbacked Indian who had chased Gus and nearly caught him had been hiding there. Not only that, he had managed to kill Josh and mutilate him without making a sound, with all the Rangers and Matilda just a few yards away.

Until that morning Call had never really felt himself to be in danger—not even when he had sat around the campfire and listened to the tortured Mexican scream. The Mexican had been a lone man, whereas they were a Ranger troop. Nobody was going to come into camp and bother them.

Now it had happened, though—an Indian had come within rock-throwing distance and killed Josh Corn. The same Indian had caught Zeke and scalped him, as quick as Sam, the cook, could wring a chicken’s neck.

Gus McCrae wished that his churning stomach would just settle. He wasn’t confident of his shooting, anyway—not beyond a certain distance—and he felt he was in a situation that might require him to shoot well, something that would not be easy, not with his stomach heaving and jerking. He wanted to be steady, but he wasn’t.

Another thing that had begun to weigh on Gus’s mind was that so far he had actually only been able to spot one Indian: Buffalo Hump. When he looked up on the mountain he couldn’t see theIndians who had shot the arrows down on them, and when he looked across the plain he couldn’t see the Indian or Indians who had shot the Major’s horse, and then Ezekiel’s, too.