Dead Man's Walk

“Yes—no doubt—he did shoot me,” Salazar said. “But in that, too, he failed.”

Then he gingerly felt his neck—he looked, with a grimace, at the stain on his hand.

“Perhaps I am wrong,” he said. “Perhaps he didn’t fail. Perhaps he merely wanted me to walk two hundred hard miles before I died.”

“He was blind at the time, Captain,” Bigfoot said. “He just made a lucky shot—I expect he would have been happy to kill you where you stood.”

Captain Salazar sighed—he looked for a moment at his weary troops.

“All right,” he said. “Unfortunately you did not accept my terms, so you are still my prisoners. If you had killed me, I would have been a martyr—now I will only be disgraced.”

“Not in my eyes—not if you’re talking about military work,” Bigfoot said. “You done your best and you’re still doing it. You took on a hard job. I doubt Caleb Cobb would have even got us this far.”

“I agree with that,” Salazar said. “I have done my best, and Colonel Cobb would not have got you this far. He would have left, to banquet with the generals and perhaps seduce their wives.”

He gestured for his soldiers to get up. Two or three merely stared at him, but most of them began to struggle to their feet.

“Unfortunately, you are not a Mexican officer, Serior Wallace,” Salazar said. “You are not one of the men who will judge me. I lost most of my men and many of my prisoners. That is what the generals will notice, when I deliver you to El Paso. Where are the rest, they will ask.”

“Captain, I’ve got some advice,” Bigfoot said. “Let’s get to El Paso and then worry about the generals.”

Salazar smiled.

“It’s time to march,” he said.

TOWARD NOON THAT DAY, as the company—strung out for almost two miles—struggled south, they came upon three dead cows, starved within a mile of one another. The buzzards were on the carcasses, but they hadn’t been on them long; all the carcasses were stiff from the night’s frost. Although all three cows were mostly just skin and bones, to the weary troop, at the point of starvation itself, their discovery seemed like a miracle. The men who lagged caught up—all the men were soon tearing at the thin carcasses with their knives, trying to scrape a few bites of meat off the cold bones.

Captain Salazar, with difficulty, restored order. He fired his pistol twice, to get the hungry men to back off. While they were making a fire and preparing to roast the bones and what little flesh remained, Bigfoot saw several specks rise into the air, from far to the south.

“I think them was ducks,” he said. “If there’s ducks there must be water. We can have us a fine soup, if that’s the case.““Well, we got the soup bones, at least,” Gus said. He ran south with Bigfoot and sure enough found a creek, mostly dry but with several small scattered pools of water.

The troop camped for two days, until every bone of the three animals had been boiled for soup. Most of the bones were then split for their marrow. The food was welcome, and also the rest. Through the two days and night, the prairie scavengers, who had been deprived of their chances at the carcasses, prowled around the camp. Coyotes and wolves stood watching during the day. Two ventured too close, a coyote and a wolf. Bigfoot shot them both, and added their meat to the soup.

“I don’t know about eating wolf,” Gus said. “A wolf will eat anything. This one might have poison in its belly, you don’t know.”

“Don’t eat it then, if you’re scared,” Bigfoot said. “There’ll be more for the rest of us.”

Call ate the wolf and coyote soup without protest. His bad foot, though still painful, was better for the rest. Near the little creek there were some dead trees—Matilda chopped off a limb with a fork in it, and made Call a rude crutch. She knew how much he hated having to be helped along by her and by Gus. He accepted it, because his only other option was death; but he accepted it stiffly. The look in his eyes was the look of a man whose pride was wounded.

“I thank you,” he said, in a formal tone, when she presented him with the rude crutch. But the look in his eyes was not formal—it was a look of gratitude. Gus saw how fond Matty had become of Call, despite his rudeness—he felt very jealous. He himself had been cheerful and friendly, and had courted Matty as much as she would allow, and yet—since the death of Shadrach—she had fastened her attentions on his surly friend. It a

Neither Call nor Matilda was saying anything, but still, they sat together, sipping wolf soup that a young Mexican soldier had just dished out of the pot.

“Now what’s the point of spending all that time with Call?” Gus asked. “Call don’t care for women. It’s rare that I could get him to go with a whore.“Bigfoot studied the couple for a minute, the large woman and the short youth.

“Matty’s got her motherly side,” he said. “Most cows will take a calf, if one comes up that needs her.”

“Why, I need her, I guess,” Gus said—now that his belly didn’t growl quite so loudly, his envy had returned.

“I’m as much a calf as he is—we’re the same age,” Gus said.

“Yeah, but you’re easy to get along with, and Woodrow ain’t,” Bigfoot said.

“Well, then, she ought to be sitting with me, not with that hardheaded fool,” Gus said. “He ain’t saying a word to her—I can out-talk him any day.”

“Maybe it ain’t talk she’s after,” Bigfoot suggested.

Long Bill Coleman had been stretched out on the ground, resting on his elbow, as he listened to the little debate.

“Why are you griping, Gussie?” he asked. “She ain’t sitting with me, either, but you don’t hear me complaining.”

“Shut up, Bill—what do you know about women?” Gus asked, testily.

“Well, I know they don’t always cotton to the easy fellows,” Long Bill said. “If they did, I’d have been married long ago. But I ain’t married, and it’s going to be another cold night.”

“Why, he’s right,” Bigfoot said. “Matty likes Woodrow because he’s hardheaded.”

“Oh, I suppose you two know everything,” Gus said. He went over to where the two sat, and plopped himself down on the other side of Matilda.

“Matty and her boys,” Bigfoot said, smiling at Long Bill. “I doubt she expected to be the mother of two pups when she headed west with this outfit.”

Long Bill wished the subject of mothers had never come up. His own had died of a fever when he was ten—he had missed her ever since.

“If Ma was alive, I expect I would have stayed with farming,” he said, with a mournful look. “She cooked cobbler for us, when she was well. I ain’t et cobbler since that was half as good.”

“I hope this starving is over,” Bigfoot said. “I don’t want to think about cobbler or taters until we get back to where folks eat regular.“The carcasses had been consumed completely—when the troop left, on the morning of the third day, they had no food at all. They were cheerful, though. The fact that they had seen ducks convinced many of the men that they were almost out of the desert. The Texans began to talk of catfish and venison, pig meat and chickens, as if they would be sitting down to lavish meals within the next few days.

Salazar listened to the talk with a grim expression.

“Senores, this is still the dead man’s walk,” he said. “We have far to go before we come to Las Cruces. Once we make it there, no one will starve.”

They marched three days without seeing a single animal; they had water, but no food. On the second evening, they used the last of their coffee. The brew was so thin it was almost colorless.

“I could read a newspaper through this coffee, if I had a newspaper,” Long Bill said, squinting into his cup.

“I didn’t know you could read, Bill,” Bigfoot said.

Long Bill looked embarrassed; the fact was, he couldn’t read. Usually, if he were lucky enough to come by a newspaper, he had a whore read it to him.