Dead Man's Walk

“Maybe she means to cook it,” Call added.

“I have heard of slaves eating turtle,” Gus said. “I believe they eat them in Mississippi.”

“Well, I wouldn’t eat one,” Call informed him. “I’d still like to get a saddle on this mare, if you ain’t too busy to help.”

The mare was snubbed to a low mesquite tree—she wound herself tighter and tighter, as she kicked and struggled.

“Let’s see what Matilda’s up to first,” Gus said. “We got all day to break horses.”

“All right, but you’ll have to take the ears, this time,” Call said. “I’ll do the saddling.”

Matilda swung her arm a time or two and heaved the big turtle in the general direction of a bunch of Rangers—the boys were cleaning their guns and musing on their headaches. They scattered like quail when they saw the turtle sailing through the air. It turned over twice and landed on its back, not three feet from the campfire.

Bigfoot Wallace squatted by the fire—he had just finished pouring himself a cup of coffee. It was chickory coffee, but at least it was black. Bigfoot paid the turtle no attention at all—Matty Roberts had always been somewhat eccentric, in his view. If she wanted to throw snapping turtles around, that was her business. He himself was occupied with more urgent concerns, one of them being the identity of the three warriors who had tortured the Mexican to death. A few hours after coming across their tracks he had dozed off and dreamed a disturbing dream about Indians. In his dream Buffalo Hump was riding a spotted horse, while Gomez walked beside him. Buffalo Hump was the meanest Comanche anyone had ever heard of, and Gomez the meanest Apache. The fact that a Comanche killer and an Apache killer were traveling together, in his dream, was highly unpleasant. Never before, that he could remember, had he had a dream in which something so unlikely happened. He almost felt he should report the dream to Major Chevallie, but the Major, at the moment, was distracted by Matilda Roberts and her turtle.

“Good morning, Miss Roberts, is that your new pet?” the Major inquired, when Matilda walked up.

“Nope, that’s breakfast—turtle beats bacon,” Matilda said. “Has anybody got a shirt I can borrow? I left mine out by the pallet.“She had strolled down to the river naked because she felt like having a wash in the cold’water. It wasn’t deep enough to swim in, but she gave herself a good splashing. The old snapper just happened to be lazing on a rock nearby, so she grabbed it. Half the Rangers were scared of Matilda anyway, some so scared they would scarcely look at her, naked or clothed. The Major wasn’t scared of her, nor was Bigfoot or young Gus; the rest of the men, in her view, were incompetents, the kind of men who were likely to run up debts and get killed before they could pay them. She sailed the snapper in their direction to let them know she expected honest behaviour. Going naked didn’t hurt, either. She was big, and liked it; she could punch most men out, if she had to, and sometimes she had to; her dream was to get to California and own a fine bordello, which was why she fell in with the first Ranger troop going west. It was a scraggly little troop, composed mostly of drunks and shiftless ramblers, but she took it and was making the best of it. The alternative was to wait in Texas, get old, and never own a bordello in California.

At her request several Rangers immediately began to take off their shirts, but Bigfoot Wallace made no move to remove his, and his was the only shirt large enough to cover much of Matty Roberts.

“I guess you won’t be sashaying around naked much longer, Matty,” he observed, sipping his chickory.

“Why not? I ain’t stingy about offering my customers a look,” Matilda said, rejecting several of the proffered shirts.

Bigfoot nodded toward the north, where a dark tone on the horizon contrasted with the bright sunlight.

“One of our fine blue northers is about to whistle in,” he informed her. “You’ll have icicles hanging off your twat, in another hour, if you don’t cover it up.”

“I wouldn’t need to cover it up if anyone around here was prosperous enough to warm it up,” Matilda said, but she did note that the northern horizon had turned a dark blue. Several Rangers observed the same fact, and began to pull on long Johns or other garments that might be of use against a norther. Bigfoot Wallace was known to have an excellent eye for weather. Even Matilda respected it—she strolled over to her pallet and pulled on a pair of blacksmith’s overalls that she had taken in payment for a brief engagement in Fredericksburg. She had a tattered capote, acquired some years earlier in Pe

“Well, we’ve conquered a turtle, I guess,” Major Chevallie said, standing up. “I suppose that Mexican died—I don’t hear much noise from across the river.”

“If he’s lucky, he died,” Bigfoot said. “It was just three Indians— Comanches, I’d figure. I doubt three Comanches would pause more than one night to cut up a Mexican.”

About that time Josh Corn and Ezekiel Moody came walking back to camp from the sandhill where they had been standing guard. Josh Corn was a little man, only about half the size of his tall friend. Both were surprised to see a sizable snapping turtle kicking its legs in the air, not much more than arm’s length from the coffeepot.

“Why’s everybody dressing up, is there going to be a parade?” Josh asked, noting that several Rangers were in the process of pulling on clothes.

“That Mexican didn’t have no way to kill himself,” Bob Bascom remarked. “He didn’t have no gun.”

“No, but he had a knife,” Bigfoot reminded him. “A knife’s adequate, if you know where to cut.”

“Where would you cut—I’ve wondered,” Gus asked, abruptly leaving Call to contemplate the Mexican mustang alone. He was a Ranger on the wild frontier now and needed to imbibe as much technical information as possible about methods of suicide, when in danger of capture by hostiles with a penchant for torture.

“No Comanche’s going to be quick enough to sew up your jugular vein, if you whack it through in two or three places,” Bigfoot said. Aware that several of the Rangers were inexpert in such matters, he stretched his long neck and put his finger on the spot where the whacking should be done.

“It’s right here,” he said. “You could even poke into it with a big mesquite thorn, or whack at it with a broken bottle, if you’re left without no knife.”

Long Bill Coleman felt a little queasy, partly because of the mescal and partly from the thought of having to stick a thorn in his neck in order to avoid Comanche torture.“Me, I’ll shoot myself in the head if I’ve got time,” Long Bill said. “Well, but that can go wrong,” Bigfoot informed him. Once set in an instructional direction, he didn’t like to turn until he had given a thorough lecture. Bigfoot considered himself to be practical to a fault—if a man had to kill himself in a hurry, it was best to know exactly how to proceed.

“Don’t go sticking no gun in your mouth, unless it’s a shotgun,” he advised, noting that Long Bill looked a little green. Probably the alkaline water didn’t agree with him.

“Why not, it’s hard to miss your head if you’ve got a gun in your mouth,” Ezekiel Moody commented.

“No, it ain’t,” Bigfoot said. “The bullet could glance off a bone and come out your ear. You’d still be healthy enough that they could torture you for a week. Shove the barrel of the gun up against an eyeball and pull—that’s sure. Your brains will get blown out the back of your head—then if some squaw comes along and chews off your balls and your pecker, you won’t know the difference.”

“My, this is a cheery conversation,” Major Chevallie said. “I wish Matilda would come back and remove this turtle.”

“I’d like to go back and have another look at them tracks,” Bigfoot said. “It was about dark when I seen them. Another look couldn’t hurt.”