Comanche Moon (67 page)

Behind his black lens he could no longer see the Colonel, which was how he preferred it. He wanted to think for a few minutes. Inez hated the black lens; she knew he could click the black lens and make her vanish from view.

But Colonel Soult was not in on the secret; he didn't know that he had just vanished from view.

All he could tell was that Blinders Scull, victor in fifteen engagements with the Rebs, was staring at him from behind the very blinders that had produced his nickname.

It made Colonel Soult distinctly uncomfortable, but no more uncomfortable, he felt sure, than having to journey back to Washington with the news that Scull had refused everything. The refusal would undoubtedly be taken as the result of his own inadequate diplomacy; he was unhappily aware that he had blundered by offering General Scull Texas before he had quite refused the whole West. If ^w of that misspeaking leaked out, the Colonel knew that his own next posting was not likely to be one that would appeal to Mrs.

Soult; if it happened to be west of Ohio, Mrs. Soult would be disturbed, it being her firm belief that Ohio was the westernmost point at which a civilized existence could be sustained. She had heard once of a frontiersman who, faced with a howling blizzard, had actually torn pages out of one of Mrs. Browning's books in order to start a fire; Mrs. Soult herself wrote a little poetry, mostly of a devotional nature--the report of the frontiersman and the fire struck her as evidence enough that, beyond Ohio, there was only barbarism and blizzards.

General Scull, secure behind his blinders, was reflecting on the fact that he had abruptly stopped hopping during the siege of Viicksburg. The flea malady, as he called it, that had seized him while in Ahumado's pit had left him because of a particularly loud cannon blast one gray morning in Mississippi. He had been hopping uncontrollably, to the bewilderment of his troops, when the cannon boomed in his ear; since then he had not indulged in a single hop.

Now he had been offered the West, land of distances and sky, the place where the last unpacified aboriginal people dwelled. He had been at a conclave once attended by a few Cheyenne and thought he had never seen a handsomer people.

The necessity of blasting and starving them into line with territorial policy did not appeal to him. It was a job he could happily refuse.

When he remembered Texas, though, he found himself unable to be quite so immediate or so categorical in his refusal. He had enjoyed tramping the plains at the head of his ranger troop--it beat mowing down his cousins from the Carolinas, or Inez's cousins from Georgia. He remembered his sharp engagements with Buffalo Hump, an enemy he had never even really seen, at close range. He remembered the daring thievery of Kicking Wolf, and the loquacity of the tracker Famous Shoes. In particular Scull remembered Ahumado, the Black Vaquero, the pit, the cages, the raw pigeons, and the blistering his brain suffered once the old Mayan had taken off his eyelids.

His friend Freddie Catherwood and his companion Johnnie Stephens had regaled him several times with tales of Chiapas and the Yucatan.

Catherwood had even given him a portfolio of drawings of lost temples in the Yucatan, made on his last journey with Johnnie Stephens.

Ahumado, he recalled, had been a man of the south, of the very regions Catherwood and Stephens had explored. Scull felt he might go someday and see the jungles and the temples, the place that had spawned his shrewdest foe.

But Ahumado, if alive, was in Mexico, whereas Texas was the theater he was being offered. He wondered which of the men he had once led were still alive, and whether Buffalo Hump still held the great Palo Duro Canyon. Scull had kept up, as best he could, with the battle reports from Texas, but it had been years since he had seen Buffalo Hump's name mentioned in connection with a raid. Like most great chiefs, his name had simply dropped from history, once he grew old.

It occurred to him, as he hid behind his blinders, that the one good reason for going back to Texas was Inez. Since there was no way to control her it was no doubt better to turn her loose on a frontier than in the somber streets of Boston.

The cattle business was booming, from what he could read. With cowboys and cattle barons to amuse her Inez might be content, for a year or two.

But Inez was in Cuba, mistress now to the greatest plantation on the island. There was no telling when or if she would return, and, in any case, experience persuaded him that it was seldom wise to return to a theater he had left. There were far too many places in the world that he hadn't seen to waste his years revisiting those he had already been to. Johnnie Stephens had been to Persia and was enthusiastic about it, going on and on about the blue mosques and the long light.

Then there was the impediment of his book. All during the war sentences and paragraphs had boiled up in his brain; he had scribbled them down on every imaginable article, including, on occasion, his saddlebags. He had worn out a whole set of Pickering's excellent little Diamond Classics, thumbing through them during intervals in battle for chance references to eyelids.

When at last he clicked his lenses and brought Colonel Soult back into focus he saw that the man was almost shaking with anxiety. Battle itself could have hardly unnerved him more than his hour in the dim old mansion on Beacon Hill.

"They thought if I came myself, to bring you their respects in person, maybe you would consider a command in the West," Colonel Soult said. "Some part of the West, at least, General." The Colonel saw from the set of General Scull's jaw that he was about to deliver a refusal. Sam Soult had not served as a subordinate to seven generals not to know when he was about to get a no rather than a yes.

"Thank them kindly, Colonel, but as you can see I'm a man of the library now," Scull said. "I've just served five years in a great war --the only struggle that still interests me is the conflict with the sentence, sir--the English sentence." Colonel Soult had got the refusal he expected, but the grounds the General gave confused him.

"Excuse me, General--the sentence?" Colonel Soult replied.

Scull seized a blank sheet of foolscap and waved it dramatically in front of Colonel Soult's face--it might make the man's job easier if he could be sent back to Washington with the conviction that the great General Inish Scull was a little teched.

"See this page of paper? It's blank," Scull said. "That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir-- this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it's harder than fighting Lee.

Why, it's harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention, which is why I can't oblige the President, or the generals who sent you here." Then he leaned back and smiled.

"Besides, they just want one to go back and eat dust so they won't have to," he said. "I won't do it, sir. That's my final ^w." "Well, if you won't, you won't, General," Colonel Soult said. It was a dictum he was to repeat to himself many times on the somber train ride back to Washington. General Scull had said no, which meant that he himself could look forward to a posting well west of Ohio, where Mrs. Browning's books were considered little better than kindling. Sam Soult knew well that it would greatly dismay his wife.

Famous Shoes was travelling by night, covering as much ground as he could, when he heard the singing to the south. At first, when he was far from the singer, he thought the faint sound he heard might be a wolf, but as he came closer he realized it was a Comanche, though only one Comanche. All that was very curious. Why would a single Comanche be singing by himself at night, on the llano?

He himself had been to the Cimarron River, where a few old people of his tribe still held out. He had been showing some of the flints he had found while tracking Captain McCrae to some of the oldest of the Kickapoos. Over the years since his discovery he had shown the flints to most of the oldest members of his tribe, and they had been impressed. He had been back several times to the place where he found the flints, and had located so many arrowheads and spearheads that he had to take a sack with him, to carry them. He had found a fine hiding place, too, on the Guadalupe River, a small cave well concealed by bushes, which is where he hid the flints that had been made by the Old p.

His one disappointment was that he had never found the hole where the People emerged from the earth. He had talked about the hole so much that the Kickapoos had come to consider him rather a bore. Of course, the hole where the People had emerged was important, but they themselves did not have time to look for it and had lost interest in talking to Famous Shoes about it.

It was while returning from his trip to the Cimarron that Famous Shoes had the misfortune to run into three of Blue Duck's half-breed renegades. They had just ambushed an elderly white man who was riding a fine gray horse.

It was the white man Famous Shoes saw first.

He had been shot two or three times, stripped of all his clothes, and left to die. When Famous Shoes spotted him he had just stumbled into a little gully; by the time Famous Shoes reached him he was staring the stare of death, though he was still breathing a little.

Then the renegades themselves came riding down into the gully. One of them rode the old man's fine horse and the others had donned pieces of his clothing, which was better clothing than their filthy rags.

"Leave him alone, he is ours," one of the renegades said insolently.

Famous Shoes was startled by the bad tone the renegades adopted. Apparently they had decided to torture the dying man a little, but before they could start the man coughed up a great flood of blood, and died.

"He is not yours now," Famous Shoes pointed out. "He is dead." "No, he is still ours," the renegade said. The three renegades were drunk. They began to hack the old man up--soon they had blood all over the clothes they had taken from him.

While the renegades were cutting up the old man, Famous Shoes left. They were in such a frenzy of hacking and ripping that they didn't notice him leaving. He was a mile away before one of the drunken killers decided to pursue him. It was not the bandit who had taken the gray horse; that man was called Lean Head.

The man who pursued Famous Shoes was a skinny fellow with a purple birthmark on his neck. Birthmarks brought either good luck or bad, and this bandit's did not bring him good luck.

Famous Shoes noticed the other two bandits riding off in the direction the old man had come from.

No doubt they wanted to scavenge among his possessions a little more thoroughly.

Because the skinny renegade was alone, and his companions headed in the other direction, Famous Shoes saw no reason not to kill his pursuer, which he did with dispatch. He had a bow and a few arrows with him which he used to provide himself with game. When the renegade loped up behind him Famous Shoes turned and put three arrows in him before the man could catch his breath. In fact, the renegade never did catch his breath again. He opened his mouth to yell for help, but before he could yell Famous Shoes pulled him off the horse and cut his throat--then he grabbed the horse's bridle and cut the horse's throat too. The horse was as skinny as the rider; Famous Shoes left them together, their lifeblood ebbing into the prairie. He left the arrows in the dead man-- there were so many guns on the plains now that it was becoming rare to see a man killed with arrows. The renegades might be so ignorant that they could not tell Kickapoo arrows from any other; they might conclude that their friend had been killed by a passing Kiowa.

The renegades, though, were not quite so ignorant.

By the middle of the afternoon Famous Shoes saw their dust, far behind him. Once he knew they were pursuing him he turned due west, onto the llano. He was soon into a land of gullies--he skipped from rock to rock and walked so close to the edge of the gullies that the pursuers could not follow his steps without riding so close to the gullies that they risked falling in.

That night he only rested for an hour. However drunken or foolish the renegades might be, pursuit was likely to make them determined, or even bold. They would think that he was a rabbit they could run to ground. They would never think that since he had killed one of them he might kill them too. In general he preferred to avoid killing men, even rude, ignorant, dangerous men, for it meant setting a spirit loose that might become his enemy and conspire against him with witches.

He ran west into the llano all night and most of the next day, not merely to evade his pursuers but to put as much distance as possible between himself and the spirit of the dead man. Now that the skinny man was dead Famous Shoes began to worry about the birthmark, which might mean that the man had had an affinity with witches.

It was as he moved deeper into the waterless llano that he heard the faint singing, at night, and determined that it was made by a single Comanche.

Famous Shoes thought he ought to just pass by the Comanche, but the closer he came to the singing, the more curious he felt. Though he knew it was dangerous to approach a Comanche, in this case he could not resist. As he eased closer to the singer it became clear to him that the man was singing the song of his life. He was singing of his deeds and victories, of his defeats and sorrows, of the warriors he had known and the raids he had ridden on.

As he came closer Famous Shoes saw that the man was indeed alone. He had only a tiny fire, made of buffalo dung, and a dead horse lay nearby. The song he sang was both a life song and a death song: the warrior had decided to leave life and had sensibly decided to take his horse along with him, so that he could ride comfortably in the spirit world.

Famous Shoes decided that he wanted to know this warrior, who had chosen such a fine way to leave life. He didn't think the Comanche would turn on him and kill him--f listening to the life song that was a death song he knew that the warrior would probably not be interested in him at all.

He knew, though, that it was not polite to interrupt such a song. He waited where he was, napping a little, until the gray dawn came; then he stood up and walked toward the warrior, who was poking up his fire a little.