Dead Man's Walk

The old woman wore a single bear tooth on a rawhide cord around her neck. The tooth was the size of a small pocketknife. Several of the men looked at it with envy; most of them would have been happy to own a bear tooth that large.

“She must have been a chiefs woman,” Long Bill speculated.

“Otherwise why would a squaw get to keep a fine grizzly tooth like that?”

Matilda Roberts knew five or six words of Comanche and tried them all on the old woman, without result. The old woman sat where she had settled when she walked into the camp, backed by a hummock of sand. Her rheumy eyes were focused on the campfire, or on what had been the campfire.

The tongueless boy, still hungry, dug most of the sandy turtle meat out of the ashes of the campfire and ate it. No one contested him, although Matilda dusted the sand off a piece or two and gnawed at the meat herself. The boy perked up considerably, once he had eaten the better part of Matilda’s snapping turtle. He did his best to talk, but all that came out were moans and gurgles. Several of the men tried to talk to him in sign, but got nowhere.

“Goddamn Shadrach, where did he go?” the Major asked. “We’ve got a Comanche captive here, and the only man we have who speaks Comanche leaves.”

As the day wore on, Gus and Call took turns getting pitched off the mare. Call once managed to stay on her five hops, which was the best either of them achieved. The Rangers soon lost interest in watching the boys get pitched around. A few got up a card game. Several others took a little target practice, using cactus apples as targets. Bigfoot Wallace pared his toenails, several of which had turned coal black as the result of his having worn footgear too small for his feet—it was that or go barefooted, and in the thorny country they were in, bare feet would have been a handicap.

Toward sundown Call and Gus were assigned first watch. They took their position behind a good clump of chaparral, a quarter of a mile north of the camp. Major Chevallie had been making another attempt to converse with the old Comanche woman, as they were leaving camp. He tried sign, but the old woman looked at him, absent, indifferent.

“Shadrach just rode off and he ain’t rode back,” Call said. “I feel better when Shadrach’s around.”

“I’d feel better if there were more whores,” Gus commented. In the afternoon he had made another approach to Matilda Roberts, only to be rebuffed.

“I should have stayed on the riverboats,” he added. “I never lacked for whores, on the riverboats.”

Call was watching the north. He wondered if it was really true that Shadrach and Bigfoot could smell Indians. Of course if you got close to an Indian, or to anybody, you could smell them. There were times on sweaty days when he could easily smell Gus, or any other Ranger who happened to be close by. Black Sam, the cook, had a fairly strong smell, and so did Ezekiel—the latter had not bothered to wash the whole time Call had known him.

But dirt and sweat weren’t what Bigfoot and Shadrach had been talking about, when they said they smelled Indians. The old woman and the boy had been nearly a mile away, when they claimed to smell them. Surely not even the best scout could smell a person that far away.

“There could have been more Indians out there, when Shad said he smelled them,” Call speculated. “There could be a passel out there, just waiting.”

Gus McCrae took guard duty a good deal more lightly than his companion, Woodrow Call. He looked at his time on guard as a welcome escape from the chores that cropped up around camp— gathering firewood, for example, or chopping it, or saddle-soaping the Major’s saddle. Since he and Woodrow were the youngest Rangers in the troop, they were naturally expected to do most of the chores. Several times they had even been required to shoe horses, although Black Sam, the cook, was also a more than adequate blacksmith.

Gus found such tasks irksome—he believed he had been put on earth to enjoy himself, and there was no enjoyment to be derived from shoeing horses. Horses were heavy animals—most of the ones he shoed had a tendency to lean on him, once he picked up a foot.

Drinking mescal was far more to his liking—in fact he had a few swallows left, in a small jug he had managed to appropriate. He had kept the jug buried in the sand all day, lest some thirsty Ranger discover it and drain the mescal. He owned a woolen serape, purchased in a stall in San Antonio, and had managed to sneak the jug out of camp under the serape.

When he brought it out and took a swig, Call looked a

“If the Major caught you drinking on guard he’d shoot you,” Call said. It was true, too. The Major tolerated many foibles in his troop, but he did demand sobriety of the men assigned to keep guard. They were camped not far from the great Comanche war trail—the merciless raiders from the north could appear at any moment. Even momentary inattention on the part of the guards could imperil the whole troop.

“Well, but how could he catch me?” Gus asked. “He’s trying to talk to that old woman—he’d have to sneak up on us to catch me, and I’d have to be drunker than this not to notice a fat man sneaking up.

It was certainly true that Major Chevallie was fat. He outweighed Matilda by a good fifty pounds, and Matilda was not small. The Major was short, too, which made his girth all the more noticeable. Still, he was the Major. Just because he hadn’t shot the scalp hunters didn’t mean he wouldn’t shoot Gus.

“I don’t believe you was ever on a riverboat—why would they hire you?” Call asked. At times of irritation he began to remember all the lies Gus had told him. Gus McCrae had no more regard for truth than he did for the rules of rangering.

“Why, of course I was,” Gus said. “I was a top pilot for a dern year—I’m a Te

The truth of that was that he had once sneaked aboard a riverboat for two days; when he was discovered, he was put off on a mud bar, near Dubuque. A young whore had hidden him for the two days— the captain had roundly chastised her when Gus was discovered. Shortly after he was put off, the riverboat ran aground—that was the one true fact in the story. The tale sounded grand to his green friend, though. Woodrow Call had got no farther in the world than his uncle’s scratchy farm near Navasota. Woodrow’s parents had been taken by the smallpox, which is why he was raised by the uncle, a tyrant who stropped him so hard that when Woodrow got old enough to follow the road to San Antonio, he ran off. It was in San Antonio that the two of them had met—or rather, that Call had found Gus asleep against the wall of a saloon, near the river. Call worked for a Mexican blacksmith at the time, stirring the forge and helping the old smith with the horseshoeing that went on from dawn till dark. The Mexican, Jesus, a kindly old man who hummed sad harmonies all day as he worked, allowed Call to sleep on a pallet of nail sacks in a small shed behind the forge. Blacksmithing was dirty work. Call had been on his way to the river to wash off some of the smudge from his work when he noticed a lanky youth, sound asleep against the wall of the little adobe saloon. At first he thought the stranger might be dead, so profound were his slumbers. Killings were not uncommon in the streets of San Antonio—Call thought he ought to stop and check, since if the boy was dead it would have to be reported.

It turned out, though, that Gus was merely so fatigued that he was beyond caring whether he was counted among the living or among the dead. He had traveled in a tight stagecoach for ten days and nine nights, making the trip from Baton Rouge through the pines of east Texas to San Antonio. Upon arrival, his fellow passengers decided that Gus had been with them long enough; he was in such a stupor of fatigue that he offered no resistance when they rolled him out. He could not remember how long he had been sleeping against the saloon; it was his impression that he had slept about a week. That night Call let Gus share his pallet of nail sacks, and the two had been friends ever since. It was Gus who decided they should apply for the Texas Rangers—Call would never have thought himself worthy of such a position. It was Gus, too, who boldly approached the Major when word got out that a troop was being formed whose purpose—other than hanging whatever horse thieves or killers turned up—was to explore a stage route to El Paso. Fortunately, Major Chevallie had not been hard to convince—he took one look at the two healthy-looking boys and hired them at the princely sum of three dollars a month. They would be furnished with mounts, blankets, and a rifle apiece. Departure was immediate; saddles proved to be the main problem. Neither Gus nor Call had a saddle, or a pistol either. Finally the Major intervened on their behalf with an old German who owned a hardware store and saddle shop, the back of which was piled with single-tree saddles in bad repair and guns of every description, most of which didn’t work. Finally two pistols were extracted that looked as if they might shoot if primed a little; and also two single-tree rigs with tattered leather that the German agreed to part with for a dollar apiece, pistols thrown in.