Comanche Moon

If there were four against them today, there might be twenty tomorrow.

"The old one is too old to be dangerous," Famous Shoes said. "He is riding a horse whose feet are split and whose teeth are gone. I think Blue Duck will catch him tomorrow." "I wish you'd told us about this other one sooner," Call said--like Gus he was confused by the news.

Famous Shoes knew that Captain Call was as smart as any ranger, yet at times he could be stupid as a possum. The tracks of the old man and the old horse were plain to see, right by the other tracks. All of the rangers had missed what was there to see.

"Why would an old man on a poor mount be in a place like this?" Augustus asked.

"That's question number one, and question number two is, why would Blue Duck be following him? I doubt he's rich enough to rob." Famous Shoes had been too preoccupied with the question of the white owls to give much thought to the questions Captain McCrae raised. The white owls had distracted him so much that he had almost forgotten about Blue Duck. But, once he stopped thinking about the owls, it was not hard to know the answers to Captain McCrae's questions.

"The old one is looking for a good place to die," Famous Shoes said.

"Lord, if that's all he wants, he can stop looking," Augustus said. "He's found his place to die." "Blue Duck is following him because he wants to kill him," Famous Shoes said. "He doesn't want to let him die of thirst. He wants to kill him. The old man is Buffalo Hump. He twists his foot when he steps, because of the hump. I should have remembered this, but I was thinking about the owls." The name gave all the rangers a start. No one had mentioned Buffalo Hump to them in several years--not since the begi

"Buffalo Hump? We thought he was dead," Call replied, startled.

"Blue Duck is his son, I recall," Augustus said. "He ran to his father's camp that day he killed Jimmy Watson." "It was cold that day," Pea Eye said. He didn't remember the Indians very well, but he did remember the cold. He had supposed he would freeze that night, for want of an adequate coat.

The whites began to speculate about why Blue Duck would want to kill Buffalo Hump, but Famous Shoes didn't listen. The young man wanted to kill the old man for all the reasons that normally drove men to kill one another. In the clear night he had just heard the song of the plover, which meant that water was near.

All night Famous Shoes sat listening.

He heard the plover cry several more times, and rjcd. Men lied often, but the plover only lied when it had eggs to protect; if the plover's nest was near, then water, too, was near. In the morning they could drink.

Blue Duck let Ermoke and Monkey John ride his spare horses because of the two Comanches who watched them for a day. Ermoke was the first to see them; it was shortly before his horse gave out. He pulled his rifle and pointed to the west, but Blue Duck, at first, could see nothing that he could clearly identify. Monkey John, so shortsighted that he would sometimes climb on someone else's horse thinking it was his own, could see nothing, but he pulled his rifle just in case.

"What you see is a yucca, or two yuccas," Blue Duck told Ermoke. He was anxious to press on and catch up with Buffalo Hump, whose track was the track of a weak old man--a man who would die within a day or two.

Blue Duck did not want his father to die before they found him. He was prepared to ignore everything else in order to catch his father before he died.

It was not until they had limped into the Lake of Horses and were drinking at the little spring that Blue Duck finally saw the two Comanches. He decided that thirst had weakened his vision; sitting well to the west, in plain view, were two Comanche warriors. They were not approaching; they were merely watching, but it made Blue Duck more anxious than ever to hurry on with the chase. Then Monkey John's horse lay down and could not rise, no matter how hard they beat him. Blue Duck knew that the Comanches must belong to the Antelope band--Quanah's band. No other Indians would dare venture that far into the llano. They must know of the little spring--perh they were its guardians. If they were there, the rest of the band must not be far.

Blue Duck knew that the Antelope would not consider him a Comanche. If they decided to kill him they would come with enough warriors to kill him, which is why he decided he had better keep Ermoke and Monkey John with him, even if it meant letting them use his spare horses. Both men were reliable shots and three rifles were better than one if it came to a fight with the Antelopes.

They rested for part of a day by the spring in the Lake of Horses; the two Comanches did not approach, but neither did they leave. Blue Duck knew his father could only be a few miles ahead. In an hour or two they could catch him and dispatch him. He wanted the horses to rest and eat. They could fill up on the weeds that grew around the little spring. He did not want to fight the Antelopes unless he had to--it was a fight he would be unlikely to win. He stayed near the spring through the night, until an hour before dawn. He meant to leave before it was light, find his father, kill him, and go north as fast as he could, to strike the Rio Carrizo or the Cimarron.

If he moved quickly enough he would soon be back in the tall grass along the Cimarron; he didn't think the Antelopes would follow him there. If necessary he would kill Ermoke and Monkey John and take the horses they rode --better to ride all the horses to death and hope to ambush a traveller on one of the westward trails than to get into a fight with the Antelopes.

In the morning, when it was light enough to scan the whole plain, Ermoke, who was very nervous, made another discovery: the rangers they thought they had outdistanced had not given up. Not only were the two Comanches still in plain sight to the west, but at least four horsemen were pursuing them from the south.

Seeing this, Ermoke became bitterly a

Now there were Comanches on one side and Texas Rangers behind them, in country too dry to live in; and they were there for no better reason than that Blue Duck wanted to settle a grudge with Buffalo Hump.

"We ought to have let him come by himself," he said, to Monkey John. "Them two to the west want our hair and the goddamn rangers want to hang us." Monkey John was too frightened of the Comanches to worry about the rangers.

"I ain't worried about the hanging," he said.

"There's nothing out here they could hang us from. I'd like to keep my hair, though, if I can.

"Besides that, we're out of tobaccy," he added, a little later.

"That's because you chewed it all up, you goddamn hog," Ermoke said. In fact Monkey John, in his opinion, was little more than a human spittoon.