Dead Man's Walk

With so many of his companions mounted and ready, Call hesitated no longer. His complaints and criticism had mainly been designed to a

“So, who’s leading the Rangers?” he asked when he untied the jaw rope and released the biting mule.“Why, we’ll lead ourselves, unless somebody shows up who wants to captain,” Long Bill said.

“Whoa—I ain’t rangering for Bob Bascom,” Gus said. “I don’t like his surly tongue—I expect I’ll have to whip him before the trip is over.”

Long Bill looked skeptical at this prediction.

“Take a good club when you go to whip him,” he said. “Bob’s stout.”

“Take two clubs,” Blackie said. “Bob’s a scrapper.”

“I didn’t expect you’d want to go fight Mexicans, Matty,” Call said, surprised to see Matilda with the Rangers.

“I’m needing to get west before I get old,” Matilda said. “I’ve heard there’s roads to the west from up around Santa Fe.”

Call’s possessions were few, though he did now have a coat to go with his two shirts. Gus McCrae, because of his urgent expenditures, had only the clothes on his back and his two pistols. When old Jesus saw that Call was leaving, he sighed. The thought of having to shoe all the horses and mules by himself made him feel a weariness. He had done hard work all his life and was ready to stop, but he couldn’t stop. All his children had left home except one little girl, and his little girl could not shoe mules. Yet he could not blame Call for going—he himself had roved, when he was young. He had left Saltillo and come to the land of the Texans, but now he was weary and his only helper was leaving. There was something about the boy that he liked, too—and he didn’t like many of the Texas boys.

“Adios,” he said, as Call was tying his blanket and his extra shirt onto his saddle.

“Adios, Jesus,” Call said—he liked the old man. They had not exchanged a cross word in all the time Call had worked for him.

“Let’s ride, boys,” Long Bill said. “Austin’s a far piece up the road.”

“We’ll ride, but I ain’t a boy,” Matilda said, as they rode out of San Antonio. Gus McCrae had a headache, from rising up too quickly after his nap.

“Boys, IT’S CLOUDING UP,” Long Bill said late in their first day out of San Antonio. “I expect we’re in for a drenching.”

“I’d rather ride all night than sleep wet,” Rip Green observed.

“Not me,” Gus said. “If I have to be wet I’d just as soon be snoozing.”

“There’s plenty of farms up this way,” Matilda said. “German families, mostly. If we could find a farm they might let us sleep on the floor. Or if they have some kind of shed for the stock, maybe we could crawl under it.”

As the sun was dipping, Call noticed that the whole southwestern quadrant of the sky had turned coal black. In the distance there was a rumbling of thunder. At the horizon the blackness was cut through with streaks of golden light from the setting sun, but the light at the bottom only made the blackness of the upper sky seem blacker. A wind rose—it whirled Call’s straw hat off his head and sailed it a good thirty feet, which a

“You ought to have a good fur cap, like I do,” he said.

They crested a ridge and spotted just what Matilda had been hoping for—a little farm. There was only one building in the little clearing, but it was a sizable log building.

“It’ll hold us all, snug, if the family is friendly,” Blackie Slidell observed.

“I hope they’re cooking pork, if they’re cooking,” Gus said. “I’d enjoy a good supper of pork.”

Call retrieved his hat, but the wind had risen so that he saw no point in sticking it back on his head. All the men were holding their hats on by this time. They were a mile or two from the little cabin, and the darkness in the sky was swelling, pushing toward them. It abruptly extinguished the sunset, but the force of the sun left an eerie light over the long prairie ahead.

The rumblings of the thunder were deeper. Call had seen many storms, and paid them little mind, but this one caught his attention. It had been a sultry day—the wind coming out of the cloud wasn’t cool. It was a sultry wind, and it blew fitfully, at first. Some gusts were so strong they caused his horse to break stride—of course, his horse was just a ski

“Why, look at that,” Gus said. “That dern cloud is behaving like a snake.”

Call looked, and saw that it was true. A portion of the cloud had formed itself into a column, or fu

“You damn young fools, that’s a cyclone,” Matilda said. “We better race for that cabin.”

The snake cloud was dipping closer and ever closer to the ground, sucking up dust and weeds as it twisted. A hawk that had been skimming the ground looking for mice or quail rose, and sped away; Call saw two deer bolt from a little thicket and flash their white tails as they raced off, away from the twisting cloud. The cloud was roaring so loudly by then that the horses began to rear and pitch. They wanted to run away, like the deer.

“We won’t make that cabin, we need to lay flat,” Long Bill advised. “That’s what you do when a cyclone hits. We best find a ditch or a gully or something, or we’re done for.““There’s a buffalo wallow,” Blackie said. “That’s all I see.”

“It ain’t deep,” Gus said. He had been feeling good, enjoying the thought of adventure, and now a dangerous cloud had come out of nowhere and spoiled his feeling. They were scarcely a mile from the cabin, but the spi

The Rangers reached the little wallow and jumped off their mounts.

“What about the horses?” Call yelled, as the roar increased.

“The devil with the horses—get flat!” Long Bill advised. “Get flat and don’t look up.”

Call did as he was told. He released his rearing mount and flattened himself under the edge of the shallow wallow. The other Rangers did the same.

Gus was fearful of Matilda’s chances—she was so big she couldn’t really hide in anything as shallow as a buffalo wallow. But there was no time to dig—she would just have to hope for the best.

Then the roaring became so loud that none of them could think. Call’s loose shirt billowed up—he thought the wind inside it was going to lift him off the ground. There was a kind of seething noise, like a snake’s hiss, only louder—it was the sound of the sand being sucked up from the shallow wallow. It was pitch black by then—as black as a moonless midnight.

Gus was wishing he’d never come to Texas—what was it but one danger after another? He had been thinking about the cabin ahead, and the pork chop he hoped to eat, and now he had his face in the dirt, being pulled at by a cloud that was like a giant snake. In Te

The sound of the cyclone was so loud, and the dust swirling up beneath them so thick, that some of the Rangers felt they werebeing deafened and suffocated at the same time. Blackie Slidell, who was limber, managed to bend his neck and get his nose inside his shirt, so he could breathe a little better.