Dead Man's Walk

But the whirling and roaring slowly diminished—when the Rangers felt it safe to lift their heads, they saw sunlight beneath the black edge of cloud, far to the west. The eerie light still hung over the prairie, a light that seemed hellish to Rip Green.

“I expect this is the kind of light you get once you’re dead,” he commented.

Matilda sat up, relieved. She had heard that cyclones took people up in the air and blew them as much as forty miles away. People who survived such removals were never again right in the head, so she had heard. Of course, being heavy, she herself was less likely than some to blow away, but then wagons sometimes blew away, and she was no heavier than a wagon.

“Are we all alive?” she asked. The grey light was so strange it made them all look different—most of them had been so scared while they were pressing themselves into the wallow that their voices sounded strange when they tried to talk.

“We’re alive but we’re afoot,” Call said. Though u

“We ought to have tied them horses, somehow,” Call added. “I expect they’ve run halfway back to San Antonio by now.”

“I’d rather lose my horse than blow away,” Gus said. “Them was just thirty-dollar horses anyway.”

“I could spare the nag, but they took everything we own with them,” Blackie said. “We’ll have to hobble into Austin and hope they allow us credit.”

“You boys are green—them horses ain’t run far,” Long Bill said. “They’ll show up in the morning, or else we’ll track ‘em.”

Now that he had survived the cyclone, Gus began to feel lively. The storm had scared his headache away, but not his appetite.

“Im still in the mood for a pork chop,” he said. “Let’s go on to that cabin. They might just be sitting down to supper.”

Having no other prospect to hand, the Rangers adopted the suggestion, only to find that the cyclone had obliterated the cabin where they had hoped to bunk. When they got to the ridge where it had been, there were only a few logs in place, and six unhappy people were stumbling around weeping and looking dazed—four children and a man and a woman. The man and the woman had lanterns and were shining them in the rubble, hoping to locate a few possessions to pile up. The four children had been scared into silence. One little girl was chewing on the hem of her dress.

Her father, a stout young man with a full beard, was inquiring about his roof in the bewildered tone that a man might use to complain about a mislaid hammer.

“Where’s my roof, dammit?” the young man said. “It was here and now it’s gone. I worked a week on my roof—now I guess it’s blown plumb over into the woods.”

“Well, we lost our horses,” Gus said—a little callously, Call felt. The stout man with the beard had a family to house. Losing a thirty-dollar horse with a cheap saddle and blanket on it was not a loss on the same scale as the man’s roof.

The area where the cabin had been was a wild litter. It was almost dark, but the Rangers could see that clothes and utensils and tools and animals were as jumbled as if they had all been hastily shoveled out of a wagon. A black rooster stood on one of the fallen logs, complaining loudly. Two shoats were grunting and rooting amid the mess, and several hens squawked.

No one paid much attention when Matilda and the six Rangers came walking up in the last of the light. The only person who seemed reasonably calm was the young woman of the house, and she was quietly picking up utensils and clothes and putting them in neat piles.

“Dern the luck—it’s a pain to lose that roof,” the stout man said. He didn’t address the remark either to his wife or to the Rangers— he seemed to be talking to himself.

“That’s enough cussing, Roy,” the young woman said. “We got visitors, and the children don’t need to hear you cussing just because the cabin got blown away. We can build another cabin.”

“I can, you mean, Melly,” the man said. “You ain’t strong enough to hoist no logs.”

“I said we got visitors, Roy—why don’t you be polite and ask them to sit, at least?” the young woman said, with a flash of temper.“You have to take weather as it comes,” she added. “Cussing don’t change it.”

“Here, maybe we can help you pick up,” Gus offered. He liked the looks of the young woman, Melly. Even in the dim light he could tell she was pretty. The husband seemed a rude sort—Gus felt it was a pity he hadn’t been blown away. A young woman that pretty might entice him to give up rangering, if she took a notion.

“Well, men, I hope you ain’t thieves, because our worldly possessions are spread out here for the picking of any damn thieves who happen to walk up,” Roy said. He was still agitated by the loss of his roof.

The Rangers did what they could by lantern light to help the little family reassemble its scattered possessions. There were no pork chops, but the young woman did have some bacon and a little cornmeal. Long Bill Coleman was a master fire builder; he soon had a good blaze going in the ruins of the little chimney. They all ate bacon and corn cakes and talked about how curious it was to see an ordinary thundercloud turn into a cyclone.

“It sucked the dern bark off that tree over there,” Roy said, pointing in the darkness to a tree nobody could see. “What kind of wind would suck the bark off an elm tree?”

“We’re all alive, though, thank the Lord,” Melly observed gratefully. She was sitting by Matilda Roberts. Though too polite to inquire, she was wondering what kind of woman would be traipsing across the prairies with six Texas Rangers. Of course on the frontier, things were less regular than they had been in eastern Missouri, where she was from.

Matilda, for her part, indulged in a little daydream in which she was married to a farmer with a beard, and had four tykes, some chickens, and a couple of shoats. In those circumstances she would have no need to accept whatever smelly ruffian came along with a dollar or two and a stiffness in his pants.

The little children, none of them yet five according to their mother, were curled up like little possums, asleep on a quilt that had escaped wetting. Long Bill Coleman brought out his harmonica —he never trusted it to his saddlebags but kept it about his person, and played a tune called “Barbara Allen.” Call liked to listen to Long Bill play the harmonica. The old tune, clear and plaintive, made a sadness come in him. He didn’t know why the music made him sad—or even what the sadness was for. After all, as the young woman said, they were all still alive, and not much worse off than they had been before the cyclone struck. The loss of the horses was a nuisance, of course, but it wasn’t because of the horses that he felt sad. He felt sad for all of them: the Rangers, Matilda, the little family that had lost its roof. They were small, and the world was large and violent. They were alive and, for the moment, well enough fed; but the very next day another storm might come, or an Indian party, and then they wouldn’t be.

“Well, I can’t dance to that old song,” Gus informed Long Bill. “I prefer tunes that I can dance to.”

“Why then, here’s ‘Buffalo Gals,’ ” Long Bill said—he was soon playing a livelier melody. Gus got up and jigged around, hoping to impress Melly with his dancing. Rip Green joined him for a bit, but the others refused to dance.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll dance on the night my roof blew off,” Roy said.

A little later Roy took his lantern and rummaged around until he found his whiskey jug, which he passed around freely. Long Bill Coleman soon put away his harmonica in order to drink, which a