Comanche Moon

Buffalo Hump saw from the awkward way Blue Duck held the lance that he had not changed. He seemed undecided as to whether to throw the lance or jab with it. Any well-trained Comanche, who knew how to use a lance, could have killed the young fool in only a few seconds.

Buffalo Hump felt the scorn he had always felt at Blue Duck's crude disregard of the old weapons. He saw that Blue Duck rode a Mexican saddle and had a buffalo gun strapped to it. But such failings didn't matter now. His son had come to kill him and had even awakened him from his death sleep to do it. All that was left was one fight, and since his son had brought two well-armed helpers, it would not be a long fight. Buffalo Hump crouched a little and waited, hoping Blue Duck would be fool enough to grapple with him. Even though he was weak, Buffalo Hump still trusted his skill with the knife. If Blue Duck were fool enough to come near him, Buffalo Hump meant to slash at his throat. Several times he had opened an enemy's windpipe so cleanly that the enemy would not even know he had been touched until blood blew out with the bubbles of air.

For a minute, there was a circling. Blue Duck shifted the lance from hand to hand; Buffalo Hump held his knife and his shield. Buffalo Hump knew that he could not move well. One of his legs had stiffened when he slept, and it was still stiff. All he could do was wait and hope Blue Duck made some foolish mistake. Buffalo Hump began to sing his war cry as he waited. His voice cracked as he sang, but he wanted his three enemies to know that he was still a Comanche warrior, a man who sang as he went into battle.

The three men looked amused when he began to sing. They thought it was fu

The comancheros didn't know these things.

They merely thought he was a silly old man, singing in a weak voice to the men who were about to kill him.

Then Blue Duck disappeared. The other two men pulled knives and waved them at him, though they didn't come within the circle of rocks.

Buffalo Hump, his vision wavery, realized that his son must have slipped behind him; before he could turn to face him, Blue Duck, who was young and nimble, struck full force with the lance. Buffalo Hump had tried to turn but the stiff leg had kept him from being able to pivot as he once had. He had twisted, and then the lance struck his hump. It went in but did not go through, though the force of the blow knocked Buffalo Hump on his face; dust was in his nostrils. He didn't feel the piercing at all, only the force of the blow. Blue Duck tried to push the lance through, or else pull it out, but could do neither. The lance point was stuck more firmly in the big hump than it had been in the buffalo skull shield. Blue Duck, maddened by the failure of his blow, jumped on his father's back and put all his weight on the lance, determined to shove it through.

"Come help!" he yelled at the two renegades--soon Buffalo Hump saw several feet moving around him as the two men and Blue Duck leaned as hard as they could on the lance.

Buffalo Hump realized that once again his foolish son had erred. Once he himself had tried to put his lance through the hump of a ru

He was jerked this way and that as the men struggled with the lance. Once he tried to slash at the feet of the men moving around him, but his fingers had no strength. He lost hold of his knife just as he was losing hold of life itself, his life as a warrior. With a final desperate push Blue Duck shoved the lance through the hump and through Buffalo Hump's body too; its red point went into the earth beneath him, just as his own arrows had once gone through the bodies of his enemies, pi

"Look at him!" one of the men said. "He still ain't dead. He's moving like an old turtle." Buffalo Hump closed his eyes. He remembered that there were old stories--old, old stories, about a great turtle that had let the People ride on its back as he brought them from their home in the earth to the place of light. He remembered the turtle story, an old story he had heard from his grandmother or from somewhere even older than his grandmother, someone who knew about the begi

"He's gone, Duck," Monkey John said, observing that the old Comanche with the ugly hump had ceased to move his arms and legs.

Blue Duck was still breathing hard from the effort it had taken to kill his father. For a few moments, when the lance stuck in the hump, he had been desperate. His fear was that his father would cheat him again by dying in his own way. His father's last looks, when he had been just a weak old man holding a knife and pretending to be a warrior, had been the same looks of determined hatred that had caused so many men to lose their will and allow Buffalo Hump to kill them. Even when the old man was pi

"Where are you going, Duck?" Ermoke asked him.

"I mean to take his head," Blue Duck said.

"Not today, you ain't got time," Ermoke said, pointing south toward the Lake of Horses.

Blue Duck saw what he meant. On the dry plain the dust thrown up by the four horses of their pursuers hung in the air. It a