Comanche Moon

In the back of Monkey John's anxious mind was another worry: Blue Duck. He had not asked them to come on the trip--if the Comanches had not showed up he would probably have left them to starve, and he still might. As they rode north Monkey John found that his worry about Blue Duck overwhelmed his other worries.

"I'm afraid Duck will kill us, once he's done with his pa," he said to Ermoke, who had stopped for a moment to relieve himself.

Ermoke ignored the comment. His own chief worry was Captain Call, whom he knew to be an implacable foe. He knew that Call must be one of the rangers who were following them--no one else in the ranger troop would have been likely to have pressed a pursuit so tenaciously.

Now, to his vexation, he saw that the rangers had found the dry lake and the spring in the center of it. They had all dismounted to drink and water their horses. It made it difficult to count them, but the count in itself was not too important. If Captain Call was one of the rangers it meant that they had plenty to worry about.

"I'm scared of Duck, he's mean," Monkey John said, a comment that amused Ermoke a good deal.

"Mean? Duck? Why, when did you notice?" he said, before he turned back north.

Famous Shoes had heard of the spring in the dry lake from one or two old men whose minds had been cloudy when they talked of it. He had not quite believed that it was a real place, and was grateful to the plover for calling and calling until he was able to find it. It was such a small spring that it took more than an hour for the horses to water--Captain Call forbade the men to drink until the horses had had their fill, an order Captain McCrae agreed with.

"We can drink our piss and make it another day or two, but these nags have to water," Augustus said. Pea Eye and Deets, their tongues thick in their mouths, waited as the two horses drank.

Pea Eye was so thirsty that his head swam.

He had begun to see double, too, a thing that had never occurred before in his life.

While the horses were drinking Augustus spotted the two Comanches. Famous Shoes was a few hundred yards to the west, exploring the edges of the old lake; he too saw the Comanches and came ru

"We should leave here as soon as we can," he said. "Those men may not like it that we have found the spring." Call could not see the two warriors-- eyesight weaker than the norm, or at least weaker than Augustus's, was an old vexation.

He did not dispute the opinion, though. The Comanches who lived in the depths of the llano still had all their fight, as many an unfortunate traveller had found out to his doom.

"Blue Duck got here first," Augustus commented. "If they're feeling frisky maybe they'll take after him." "Maybe--or they might take after us both," Call said.

Famous Shoes thought that the little spring must be holy. The old people who had talked about it said it was near the place where the People had come out of the earth.

Now only a few birds and the Antelope Comanche knew where it was. If the spring .was holy it might not want to give its water to strangers; that might be why it flowed so slowly.

He was glad when the horses and the men had finished drinking--he did not want to disturb the spring that might be holy by taking too much from it.

When Buffalo Hump awoke he reached for his lance, but Blue Duck had already taken it.

Buffalo Hump had been deep in a dream--in his dream he had seen millions of buffalo grazing, as they had grazed on the plains in his youth. Because of the buffalo, he did not want to wake up. He wanted to dream his way into the spirit world, where Comanches rode forever. For that reason he had tried to ignore the voices that he had begun to hear in his dream.

The voices were not the voices of Comanches, and they were not ghosts. For that reason he tried to ignore them, to stay in his comfortable sleep, dreaming of buffalo.

But the voices were too loud; soon he felt the prickling in his senses that he always felt when an enemy was near, or when there was some threat from the wild. Once the prickling awakened him when a herd of buffalo were stampeding toward the place where he rested. He had had to mount quickly and ride for his life. Another time the prickling saved him from a great she-bear, angry because a hunter had killed her cub; many times it had alerted him to the approach of human enemies, some of them Indian and some of them white.

Buffalo Hump had come to the place of black rocks to die. He wanted to help his spirit slip away from his body, and, for that reason, he ignored the prickling and the voices. It was when he felt the point of his own lance touch his side that he could ignore the voices no longer.

He opened his eyes and rose to his feet, but he was stiff; he rose slowly, and, anyway, it was too late. Blue Duck had his lance. It was Blue Duck who had poked him in the ribs with his own lance: he thrust with it again, but this time Buffalo Hump blocked the lance with his buffalo skull shield, which he had kept in his lap as he slept.

The lance point hit the shield and, for a moment, stuck in the thick bone of the buffalo's skull.

Buffalo Hump held on to his shield, Blue Duck to the lance. The men with Blue Duck, one half-breed and one white, watched the brief moment of pushing and pulling silently. One of them held the short bow that Buffalo Hump had brought with him. It was plain, though, that the man could not shoot the bow. He had merely taken it so Buffalo Hump could not shoot at them with the small arrows that were only good for killing rabbits and other small game. The third man was short and misshapen, with eyes like a goat. Buffalo Hump saw that the men were comancheros or renegades of some kind, low men his son had brought with him on his errand of killing.

Finally, with a jerk that almost pulled Buffalo Hump out of the circle of black rocks, Blue Duck freed the end of the lance. He did not speak and neither did Buffalo Hump. It was obvious that Blue Duck had learned of his departure from the camp and had followed him to kill him. It was clear, too, that Blue Duck wanted to kill him badly, for he had gone to a great deal of trouble to follow him to the place of the black rocks. He and his two comancheros might have starved.

Rather than talk, Buffalo Hump took out his knife, the one weapon left to him. A knife was not much use against a lance but was all he had to fight with; and it .was a knife that had pierced the vitals of many enemies. Buffalo Hump had taken the knife off the body of a bluecoat soldier near the Rio Concho many years before.

Blue Duck was smiling--he knew it would be easy to kill an old man who had only a knife to fight with. Besides the lance, he and his men had several guns.

"I reckon you took too long a nap, old man," Blue Duck said. He moved just outside the ring of rocks, holding the lance as if he might throw it.