Dead Man's Walk

Before she had gone twenty yards the Indians appeared from behind the jutting spur of mountain. There were nine in all, and Buffalo Hump was in the lead.

Major Chevallie wished for his binoculars, but his binoculars were on the horse that had been killed.

Several of the Rangers raised their rifles when the Indians came in sight, but Bigfoot yelled at them to hold their fire.

“You couldn’t hit the dern hill at that distance, much less the Indians,” he said. “Besides, they’re leaving.”

Sure enough the little group of Indians, led by Buffalo Hump, walked their horses slowly past the front of the Rangers’ position. They were going east, but they were in no hurry. They rode slowly, in the direction of the Pecos. Matilda was more than one hundred yards from camp by that time, looking for Josh Corn’s body, but she didn’t look at the Indians and they didn’t look at her.

Call and Gus stood together, watching. They had never before seen a party of Indians on the move. Of course, in San Antonio there were a few town Indians, drunk most of the time. Now and then they saw an Indian of a different type, one who looked capable of wild behaviour.

But even those unruly ones were nothing like what Call and Gus were watching now: a party of fighting Comanches, riding at ease through the country that was theirs. These Comanches were different from any men either of the young Rangers had ever seen. They were wild men, and yet skilled. Buffalo Hump had held a corpse on the back of his racing pony with one hand. He had scalped Zeke Moody without even getting off his horse. They were wild Indians, and it was their land they were riding through. Their rules were not white rules, and their thinking was not white thinking. Just watching them ride away affected young Gus and young Call powerfully. Neither of them spoke until the. Comanches were almost out of sight.

“I’m glad there was just a few of them,” Gus said, finally. “I doubt we could whip ‘em if there were many more.”

“We can’t whip ‘em,” Call said.

Just as he said it, Buffalo Hump stopped, raised the two scalps high once again, and yelled his war cry, which echoed off the hill behind the Rangers.

Gus, Call, and most of the Rangers raised their guns, and some fired, although the Comanche chief was far out of range.

“If we was in a fight and it was live or die, I expect we could whip ‘em,” Gus said. “If it was live or die I wouldn’t be for dying.”

“If it was live or die, we’d die,” Call said. What he had seen that morning had stripped him of any confidence he had once had in the Rangers as a fighting force. Perhaps their troop could fight well enough against Mexicans or against white men. But what he had seen of Comanche warfare—and all he had seen, other than the scalping of Zeke Moody, was a brief, lightning-lit glimpse of Buffalo Hump throwing his lance—convinced him not merely in his head but in his gilt and even in his bones that they would not have survived a real attack. Bigfoot and Shadrach might have been plainsmen enough to escape, but the rest of them would have died. “Any three of them could finish us,” Call said. “That one with the hump”could probably do it all by himself, if he had taken a notion to.

Gus McCrae didn’t answer. He was scared, and didn’t like the fact one bit. It wasn’t just that he was scared at the moment, it was that he didn’t know that he would ever be anything but scared again. He felt the need to move his bowels—he had been feeling the need for some time—but he was afraid to go. He didn’t want to move more than two or three steps from Call. Josh Corn had just gone a few steps—very few—and now Buffalo Hump was waving his scalp in the air. He was waving Ezekiel’s too, and all Zeke had done was ride a short distance out of camp. Gus was standing almost where Josh had been taken, too. Looking around, he couldn’t see how even a lizard could hide, much less an Indian, and yet Buffalo Hump had hidden there.

Gus suddenly realized, to his embarrassment, that his knees were knocking. He heard an unusual sound and took a moment or two to figure out that it was the sound of his own knees knocking together. His knees had never done that in his life—they had never even come close. He looked around, hoping no one had noticed, and no one had. The men were all still watching the Comanches. The men were all scared: he could see it. Maybe old Shadrach wasn’t, and maybe Bigfoot wasn’t, but the rest of them were mostly as shaky as he was. Matilda wasn’t, either—she was walking back, the body of Josh Corn in her arms.

Gus looked at Call, a man his own age. Call should be shaking, just as he was, but Call was just watching the Indians. He may not have been happy with the situation, but he wasn’t shaking. He was looking at the Comanches steadily. He had his gun ready, but mainly he just seemed to be studying the Indians.

“I don’t like ‘em,” Gus said, vehemently. He didn’t like it that there were men who could scare him so badly that he was even afraid to take a shit.

“I wish we had a ca

“We are better armed than they are,” Call said. “He killed Josh with an arrow and scalped Zeke with a knife. They shot arrows down on us from that hill. If they’d shot rifles I guess they would have killed most of us.”

“They have at least one gun, though,” Gus then pointed out. “They shot them horses.”

“It wouldn’t matter if we had ten ca

The Comanches were just specks in the distance by then.

“I have never seen no people like them,” Call said. “I didn’t know what wild Indians were like.

“Those are Comanches,” he added.

Gus didn’t know what his friend meant. Of course they were Comanches. He didn’t know what answer to make, so he said nothing.

Once Buffalo Hump and his men were out of sight, the troop relaxed a little—just as they did, a gun went off.

“Oh God, he done for himself!” Rip Green said.

Zeke Moody had managed to slip Rip’s pistol out of its holster— then he shot himself. The shot splattered Rip’s pants leg with blood.

“Oh God, now look,” Rip said. He stooped and tried to wipe the blood off his pants leg with a handful of sand.

Major Chevallie felt relieved. Travel with the scalped boy would have been slow, and in all likelihood he would have died of infection anyway. Joh

“Now you’ll have to dig another,” the Major informed them.

“Why, they were friends—let ‘em bunk together in the hereafter,” Bigfoot said. “It’s too rocky out here to be digging many graves.”

“It’s not many—just two,” the Major said, and he stuck to his point. The least a fallen warrior deserved, in his view, was a grave to himself.

When Matilda saw what Zeke had done, she cried. She almost dropped Josh’s body, her big shoulders shook so.

“Matty’s stout,” Shadrach said, in admiration. “She carried that body nearly five hundred yards.”

Matilda sobbed throughout the burying and the little ceremony, which consisted of the Major reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Both boys had visited her several times—she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn’t last long, once they became men. Both of them, in her view, deserved better than a shallow grave by a hill beyond the Pecos, a grave that the varmints would not long respect.

“Do you think Buffalo Hump left?” the Major asked Bigfoot. “Or is he just toying with us?”