Dead Man's Walk

Captain Salazar, cheered by the knowledge that his troop was saved, became a captain again and soon had reassured the jefe that they were not ghosts, but a detachment of the Mexican army, on an important mission involving dangerous captives.

It was not hard to convince the jefe that the Texans were dangerous men—they looked as wild as Apaches, to the old man. Once the kid was delivered, the jefe immediately sprang to work and soon had the whole village up, building fires and preparing food for the starving men. Several sheep were slaughtered, while the women set about making coffee and tortillas.

Because it was Gus who had seen the light and saved the troop, Captain Salazar decreed that the Texans would not be bound. He was aware that he himself would have missed the light and probably the village, in which case all his men would have died. There would have been no medals, and no promotion. The Texans were put in a shed where the sheep were sheared, with a couple of good fires to warm them. Gus, sitting with Call, soon got to hear the very sound he had dreamt of: the sound of fat sizzling, as it dripped into a fire.

Some of the men were too tired even to wait for food. They took a little hot coffee, grew drowsy, and tipped over. The floor of the shed was covered with a coat of sheep’s wool, mixed with dirt. The wool made some of the men sneeze, but that was a minor irritation.

“I guess we lost Long Bill,” Bigfoot said.

“If we lost him, we lost Joh

Long after most of the Texans had eaten a good hunk of mutton and gone to sleep, there was a shout from the Mexicans. Long Bill Coleman, his clothes a suit of ice, came walking slowly into the circle of fires, carrying Joh

He laid his friend down by the warmest campfire and himself stood practically in the flames, shaking and trembling from cold and from exertion. He held out his hands to the fire; he was so close that ice began to melt off his clothes.

“If that’s mutton, I’ll have some,” he said. “I swear, it’s been a cold walk.”

FOR THREE DAYS THE Texans, under guard again, never left their sheep shed, except to answer calls of nature. Captain Salazar’s escort had been reduced by more than twenty men, lost and presumed frozen back along the sleety trail—six Texans failed to make the village. The weather stayed so cold that most of the men were glad of the confinement. They were allowed ample firewood, and plenty to eat. Blackie Slidell had to have two frostbitten toes removed—Bigfoot Wallace performed the operation with a sharp bowie knife—but no one else required amputations.

Once the people of the village realized that the Texans were not spectres, they were friendly. The old jefe, still much occupied with his lambing in the terrible weather, saw that they had ample food. The men could drink coffee all day—poor coffee, but warming. Noticing that Call was injured, one old woman asked to look at his back; when she saw the blackened scabs, she drew in her breath and hurried away. A few minutes later the woman returned, another woman at her side. The other woman was so short she scarcely came to Bigfoot’s waist. She had with her a little pot—she went quickly to Call, but instead of lifting his shirt as the first woman had, she put her thin face close to his back and sniffed.

“Hell, she’s smelling you,” Bigfoot said. “I wonder if you smell like venison.”

Bigfoot’s remarks were sometimes so foolish that Call was irritated by them. Why would he smell like venison? And why was the wizened little Mexican woman smelling him, anyway? He was passive, though—he didn’t answer Bigfoot, and he didn’t move away from the woman. The village women had been unexpectedly kind—the food they brought was warm and tasty; one woman had even given him an old serape to cover himself with. It had holes in it, but it was thickly woven and kept out the chill. He thought perhaps the tiny woman who was sniffing him was some kind of healer; he knew he was in no position to reject help. He was still very weak, often feverish, and always in pain. He could survive while in the warmth of the sheep shed, but if he were forced to march and was caught in another sleet storm, he might not live. He could not ask Gus or Matilda to carry him again, as they had the first time.

The little woman sniffed him thoroughly, as a dog might, and then set her pot in the edge of the nearest campfire. She squatted by it, muttering words no one could understand. When she judged the medicine to be ready, she gestured for Call to remove his shirt; she then spent more than two hours rubbing the hot ointment into his back. She carefully kneaded his muscles and spread the ointment gently along the line of every scar. At first the ointment burned so badly that Call thought he would not be able to stand the pain. The burning was far worse than what he could remember of the whipping itself. For several minutes, Gus and Matilda had to talk to him, in an effort to distract him from the burning; at one point, they thought they might have to restrain him, but Call gritted his teeth and let the little woman do her work. In time a warmth spread through his body and he slept soundlessly, without moaning, for the first time since the whipping.

The next day, through a crack in the wall, Gus saw the same woman applying ointment to Captain Salazar’s neck. The Captain looked weak. He had taken a fever, which soared so high that he was sometimes incoherent; the jefe took him into his house and the little woman tended him until the fever dropped. Even so, the Captain was at first too weak to walk in a straight line. He wanted to stay and rest in San Saba, but when the weather warmed a little, he decided he had better take advantage of it and press on. He came to the Texans’ shed, to inform them of his decision.

“Enjoy a warm night,” he told them. “We leave tomorrow.”

“How many days before we get across this dead man’s walk?” Long Bill asked.

“Senor, we have not yet come to the Jornada,” Salazar said. “The land here is fertile because of the underground water. Once we get beyond where the sheep are, we will start the dead man’s walk.”

The Texans were silent. They had all convinced themselves that the day of the sleet would be their worst day. They had forgotten that Salazar said the dead man’s walk was two hundred miles across. They had grown used to the coziness of the shed, and the warmth of the campfires. Each of them could remember the bitter cold, the pain of marching on frozen feet, the sleet, and the hopeless sense that they would die if they didn’t find warmth.

They had found warmth; but Salazar had just reminded them that the hardest part of the journey had not even begun. Some of the men hunched closer to the campfires, holding out their hands to the warmth—they wanted to hug the warmth, keep it as long as they could. Few of them slept—they wanted to sit close to the fires and enjoy every bit of warmth left to them. They wanted the warmth to last forever, or at least until summertime. Joh

Informed by the old jefe that there was neither food nor water enough for many horses in the barren region that awaited them, Salazar kept only one horse—his own—and traded several for two donkeys and as much provender as the donkeys could carry. On the morning of departure, abruptly, he decided to reduce the force to twenty-five men. He reasoned that twenty-five could probably hold off the Apaches, if they attacked—more than twenty-five would be impossible to provision on such a journey. The Texans alone would account for most of the provisions the donkeys could carry.What that meant was that the Texans would slightly outnumber his own force; and the Texans, man for man, were stronger than his troops.