Comanche Moon

When he spoke again he had some trouble controlling his voice.

"Billy, he was a fine pard, let's go home," he said finally.

Pearl Coleman had a brother, Joel, who was stout like her. Joel helped his sobbing sister back down the path toward town. The ladies who liked Pearl and had come to support her in her hour of grief followed the brother and sister away. The other townspeople trickled away in twos and threes but the rangers were reluctant to leave. In the heat of battle they had surrendered many comrades to death, often having no opportunity to bury them or take note of their passing at all. But this death had not occurred in battle; it occurred because Long Bill, a man who had been stouthearted through much violent strife, wanted it.

"I wish we'd had time to caulk the coffin," Ikey Ripple said. "I expect it'll be worms and maggots for Billy, pretty soon." The others cast hard glances at him, causing Ikey to conclude that his views were not appreciated. He decided to seek a saloon, and was joined in his search by Lee Hitch and Stove Jones, men disposed to overlook his views of worms and maggots.

"Reckon Bill would change his mind, if he had a chance to?" Gus asked Call. They were the last to leave, although Pea Eye was not far from them on the path.

Call had been asking himself the same question all day. The last conversation he had had with Long Bill Coleman had been a casual one about the relative merits of mares and geldings, as saddle horses. Long Bill argued for geldings, as being more stable; Call argued for mares, for their alertness. Long Bill talked fondly of a horse he had favored in earlier years, a sorrel gelding named Sugar who had carried him safely on many patrols. Call reminded Bill of a time when Sugar had shied at a badger and run away with him. They had a chuckle, remembering the runaway.

It had been an easy conversation about horses, of the sort he had often had with Long Bill over the years. Sugar grew old and had to be put out to pasture, but Long Bill, from time to time, would have another gelding whose virtues he would brag about, just as Call, from time to time, would acquire an exceptional mare. They would often talk about horses, he and Bill--whatever troubles might be elsewhere in their lives never dampened their interest in the pleasure to be had with good horses.

"He can't change his mind, Gus--x's foolish to even think that way," Call said.

"Gone is gone." "I know it," Gus said--yet he could not stop wondering about Long Bill. In the saloon the night before Long Bill had seemed somber, but not more somber than he had been on many a night.

Augustus couldn't get the business of hanging out of his mind. Hanging wasn't simple, like shooting oneself. Shooting he could imagine. A momentary hopelessness, such as he himself had felt several times since Clara's marriage, could cause a man to grab a pistol and send a bullet into his brain. A few seconds, rushing by so fast they gave one no time for second thoughts, would allow a man to end the matter.

But hanging was different. A rope had to be found, and a stool to climb on. Long Bill had watched the hanging of quite a few thieves and miscreants in his years of rangering; he knew the result was often imperfect, if the knot was set wrong. The hanged man might dangle and kick for several minutes before his air supply was finally cut off. Care had to be taken, when a hanging was contemplated. A good limb had to be chosen, for one thing. Limbs that looked stout to the eye would often sag so far in practice that the hanged man's feet would touch the ground. Long Bill had never been skilled with his hands, thus his quick failure as a carpenter. It taxed him to tie a simple halter knot. The more Gus thought about the physical complications involved in hanging, the more perplexed he felt that his friend had been able to manage his final action successfully.

And why? Had there been a sharp quarrel? Had a nightmare afflicted him so powerfully that he lost his bearings? It seemed that Long Bill was so determined to be free of earthly sorrow that he had gone about the preparations for his death with more competence than he had been capable of when only the chores of life were involved. He had even done it all in the dark, perhaps fearing that if he saw the bright sunrise he might weaken in his resolve and not do it.

"I just wonder what Bill was thinking, there at the end," Gus said.

"You can wonder all you want to," Call said. "We'll never know that. It's just as well not to think about it." "I can't help thinking about it, Woodrow--c you?" Gus asked. "I was the last man to drink with him. I expect I'll think about it for years." They had walked back almost to the steps that led to Maggie's rooms.

"I think about it," Call admitted. "But I ought to stop. He's dead. We buried him." Call felt, thought, that the comment had been inadequate. After all, he too had been friends with Long Bill for many years. He had known several men who had lost limbs in battle; the men all claimed that they still felt things in the place where the limb had been. It was natural enough, then, that with Bill suddenly gone he and Gus would continue to have some of the feelings that went with friendship, even though the friend was gone.

"I can't be thinking about him so much that I can't get the chores done, that's what I meant," Call added.

Augustus looked at him curiously, a look that was sort of aslant.

"Well, that's you, Woodrow--y'll always get the chores done," Augustus said. "I ain't that much of a worker, myself. I can skip a chore now and then, if it's a sunny day." "I don't know what sunny has to do with chores--they need to be done whether it's sunny or not," Call said.

Augustus was silent. He was still thinking about Long Bill, wondering what despair had infested his mind while he was looking for the rope and setting the milking stool in place.

"It's funny," he said.

"What is?" Call asked.

"Billy was the worst roper in the outfit," Augustus said. "If you put him in the lots with a tame goat, the goat would die of old age before Billy could manage to get a loop on it.

Remember?" "Why, yes, that's true," Call said. "He was never much of a roper." "It might take him six or seven tries just to catch his own horse," Augustus said. "If we was in a hurry I'd usually catch his horse for him, just to save time." Call started to go up the stairs to see Maggie, but paused a moment.

"You're right," he said. "The only thing the man ever roped on the first try was himself. That's a curiosity, ain't it?" "Why yes," Augustus said. "That's a curiosity." Call still had his hat in his hand; he put it on and went up the steps to Maggie.

Woodrow's lucky and he don't know it, Augustus thought. He's got a girl to go to.

I wish I had a girl to go to. Whore or no whore, I wouldn't care.

With no way to shade his pupils, Scull began to pray for rain--or, if not rain, at least a cloud, anything that might bring his eyes relief. Even on cool days the white light of the sun at noon brought intense headaches. The light was like a hot needle, stabbing and stabbing into his head. Rolling his eyes downward brought a few moments of relief, but not enough--day after day the white light ate at his optic nerve. Even though he heard the caballero Carlos Diaz tell Ahumado that the Texans had agreed to send the cattle for his ransom, Scull felt little hope. He might be blind or insane before the cattle arrived; besides, there was no certainty that Ahumado would honor the ransom anyway. He might take the cattle and kill the Texans-- if he respected the bargain it would be mere whim.

From the noon hour each day until the sun edged behind the western cliffso, Scull felt himself not far from madness, from the pain in his eyes. The only thing that saved him, in his view, was that the season was young and the days still fairly short; also, Ahumado had pitched his camp in a canyon, a deep slot in the earth. In the canyon the sun rose late and set early; it only burned at his eyes for some six hours a day, and often spring thunderheads drifted over the canyon and brought him some minutes of relief.

As soon as the sun went behind the canyon wall Ahumado took him from the skinning post and put him back in the cage. Scull then covered his head with his arms, to make a cave of darkness for his throbbing eyes. Sometimes, instead of drinking the water they brought him, he poured a little in his palms and wet his throbbing temples. He could hear the rippling of the little stream that ran not far away; at night he dreamed of thrusting his head in the cool water and letting it soothe his eyes.

He no longer sang or cursed, and when, now and then, he tried to remember a line of verse, or a fragment of history, he couldn't. It was as if the white light itself had burned away his memory, so that it would no longer give back what was in it. The old bandit was clever, more clever than Scull had supposed. He might take the Texans' cattle and send them back their captain--only the captain he sent back would be blind and insane.

The one weapon Scull had left to him was his hatred--alw, throughout his life, hatred had come easier to him than love. The Christian view that one should love his brethren struck him as absurd.

His brethren were conniving, brutish, dishonest, greedy, and cruel--and that judgment included, particularly, his own brothers and most of the men he had grown up with. From the time he first hefted a rifle and swung a sword he had loved combat.

He sought war and liked it red. His marriage to Inez was a kind of war in itself, which was one reason he stayed in it. Several times he had come close to choking her to death, and once he even managed to heave her out a window, unfortunately only a first-floor window, or he would have been rid of the black bitch, as he sometimes called her. He had no trouble hating any opponent, any prey: red Indians, bandits, horse thieves, card cheats, pimps, bankers, lawyers, governors, senators. He had once pistol-whipped a man in the foyer of the Massachussetts statehouse because the man spat on his foot.

All his earlier hatreds, though, seemed casual and minor when compared to the hatred he felt for Ahumado, the Black Vaquero. There was nothing of chivalry in Scull's hatred--no respect for a worthy opponent, none of the civilities that went with formal warfare. Scull dreamed of getting Ahumado by the throat and squeezing until his old eyes popped out. He wanted to saw off the top of the man's head and scoop out his brains, as they had scooped out the steaming brains of Hector, his great horse. He wanted to open his belly and strew his old guts on the rocks for carrion birds to peck at.

Ahumado had outsmarted him at every turn, had caught him easily, stripped him, hung him in a cage, taken his eyelids; and he had done it all with light contempt, as if it were an easy, everyday matter to outsmart Inish Scull. The old man didn't appear to want his death, particularly; he could have had that at any time.

What he wanted was his pride, and taking the eyelids was a smart way to whittle it down.

When the sun shone full in his face, Scull's pupils seemed as wide as a tunnel, a tunnel that let searing light into his brain. At times he felt as if his own brains were being cooked, as Hector's had been.

The hatred between Scull and Ahumado was a silent thing now. For most of the day the two men were no more than fifty feet apart. Ahumado sat on his blanket; Scull was either in his cage or tied to the skinning post. But no ^ws passed between them--only hatred.

Scull tried, as best he could, to keep track of days. He lined up straws in the corner of his cage. Keeping a crude calendar was a way of holding out. He needed to keep his hatred high, to calculate when he might expect the Texans. Once the season advanced, once spring gave way to summer, the sun would burn even hatred out of him. He knew it. The old dark man sitting a few feet away would become meaningless. The sun would cook away even hatred--and when hatred was gone there would be nothing left.

While he could, though, he lined up straws in the corner of his cage and imagined revenge. One morning it rained, a blessed rain that continued to fall for eight hours or more. They did not bother tying him to the skinning post that day--there was no sun to afflict him. Scull scraped at the puddles in his cage and made a paste of mud, which he plastered over his sore eyes. The relief was so great that he wept, beneath his mud poultices.

All day he kept on, putting the mud poultices over his eyes. No one came near him. Ahumado, who hated rain, stayed in his cave. Later, when the rain had subsided to a cool drizzle, Scull heard two vaqueros talking. The vaqueros wanted to kill him--they were convinced he was a witch. What he did with the mud was a thing a witch would do. The vaqueros had long believed that Scull was a witch and were annoyed at Ahumado for allowing a witch to live in their midst; he might cause someone to be struck by lightning; he might even cause the cliff to fall and bury them all alive. They wanted to take out their guns and shoot many bullets into Scull, the witch in the cage. But they could not because Scull belonged to Ahumado, and only Ahumado could order his death.

When Scull overheard the conversation, he felt his strength revive a little. Because of the rain and the mud, he was saved for a little time. Perhaps he .was a witch--at least, perhaps, he could play on the vaqueros' superstition. At once, in his croak of a voice, he began to sing in Gaelic, a sea ditty a sailor had once taught him in Boston. He couldn't sing loud and had forgotten most of the Gaelic song, but he sang anyway, with mud plastered over his eyes.

When he took the plasters off Scull saw that the vaqueros and everyone else in the camp had moved as far away from him as they could get. He had witched them back, and if the mud puddles would just last a few days he might keep witching them until the Texans came with the cattle--at least it was something to try.

Ahumado even came out of his cave for a moment, although he disliked rain. He wanted to watch the strange white man who put mud on his eyes.

When Buffalo Hump and Worm were only two days from the canyon, they met up with Fat Knee and two other boys. One of the boys, White Crow, was so good with snares that he had caught several wild turkeys. Of course they were glad to share the turkey meat with their chief.

Buffalo Hump ate the turkey happily but Worm refused it, believing that turkey meat might affect his brain; turkeys were easily confused, and so might be the people who ate them, Worm reasoned. Buffalo Hump thought the notion was ridiculous and tried to joke Worm out of his silly belief.

"ally are confused," he told Worm, "but if I ate you I would still be smart." Fat Knee had always been afraid of Buffalo Hump--the sight of the great hump made him fearful. While Buffalo Hump was eating a wild turkey hen, Fat Knee blurted out the business about Blue Duck and Famous Shoes.

He was afraid that if he waited Blue Duck might try to put the blame for the whole episode on him. Blue Duck was a good liar; he was always managing to get other people blamed for his mistakes. Also, of course, he was Buffalo Hump's son. Fat Knee assumed that Buffalo Hump would more likely believe his own son than an insignificant young warrior named Fat Knee.

But when he blurted out the admission that he and Blue Duck had tried to trade Famous Shoes to Slow Tree, Buffalo Hump didn't seem particularly interested.

"You should change your name," the chief suggested.

"Your parents gave you that name because when you were young a snake bit you on the knee and made your knee fat. Now you are grown and your knee isn't fat. If I were you I would change my name." Fat Knee was relieved that Buffalo Hump wasn't angry about the business with Famous Shoes. He had been worrying about Buffalo Hump's reaction to that business for many days. In fact, though, Buffalo Hump seemed more annoyed with Worm for his reluctance to eat turkey meat than he was about the matter of Famous Shoes and Slow Tree.

As they were riding north, Buffalo Hump brought up the matter of his name again.

"People who are named for parts of the body can only be jokesters and clowns," Buffalo Hump told him. "Look at Straight Elbow--his name ruined him. If you were named for your scrotum it would be the same. No matter how hard you fought in battle, people would get tickled when they said your name. Soon you would forget about being brave. It would be enough that you were funny. You would only be a clown." Fat Knee recognized that what Buffalo Hump said might be true, but he had no idea what he should change his name to. His father had named him Fat Knee, and his father, Elk Shoulders, was an irascible man. If he went to his father and announced that he wanted to change his name, his father might hit him so hard with a club that his brains would spill out like clotted milk.

Still, Buffalo Hump was the chief. It would not do to ignore his suggestion completely. Buffalo Hump was known to hold grudges, too. He had been known to kill people over incidents or embarrassments that had occurred so long ago that most people had forgotten them. Often the warrior who suddenly found himself being killed would be dispatched so quickly that he could not even remember what he had done to deserve the knife or the lance.

As they were riding north Fat Knee rode up beside Buffalo Hump and put a question to him.

"If I change my name from Fat Knee, what will I change it to?" he asked.

Buffalo Hump gave the matter only a moment's thought.

"Change it to Many Dreams," Buffalo Hump suggested. "The name will make you dream more.

If you can learn to dream enough we might make you into a medicine man." While Fat Knee was thinking about the name "Many Dreams," which pleased him, they saw an Indian sitting on the edge of a low butte not far to the west. The butte was not high--it was no more, really, than a pile of rocks. Buffalo Hump immediately recognized the warrior's horse, a small gray gelding.

"That is Red Hand's horse," he said. "Why is Red Hand sitting on that pile of rocks?" No one had any idea--Red Hand was a gregarious man who usually stayed in camp so that he could couple frequently with his wives. He liked to lie on soft elk skins and have his wives rub his body with buffalo tallow. He also liked to wrestle but was hard to throw because his wives had made him slippery with the tallow. He had never been known to sit on a pile of rocks far from camp.

When they came to where the gray horse stood, Red Hand was staring up into the sky. His body was shaking. He did not look at them. He kept his face turned up to the sky.

"He is praying--we had better just leave him to his prayers," Worm said. Worm wanted very much to be back in camp; too many things that he had seen on this trip did not seem right to him. The sight of the Old One had unnerved him badly.

Now they were almost home and Buffalo Hump was slowing them down again, just because of Red Hand.

The delay was one thing too many for Worm, who did not hide his impatience, forgetting that Buffalo Hump could be impatient too. Before Worm realized the danger he had pushed too hard. Buffalo Hump whirled on him--he did not raise his lance or draw his bow, but the death he could deal with them was there, in his eyes.

"I want you to wait until Red Hand has finished his prayer," he said. "He might need to talk to you. He would not come so far to pray unless it was important. Once he has finished and we have all talked to him, then we will go home." Worm restrained himself with difficulty. He did not like to be corrected. Red Hand was a man of no judgment; probably he was just sitting on a rock pile praying because his wife had refused him, although it was true that Red Hand was shaking as if his life were about to end.

Worm composed himself and waited. Fat Knee caught a mouse and he and the other boys amused themselves with it for a while, catching it under a cup and then releasing it, only to catch it again before it could get to a hole.

Finally Red Hand stopped shaking so much. His eyes had been turned up to the sky--he had been seeing only what was inside his prayer. When he lowered his head and saw several people waiting for him he looked very surprised.

"I came here to pray," he said. Then he could not seem to think of more ^ws. He got to his feet, moving like an old man, and mounted his gray horse.

"This is a new place you have found to pray," Buffalo Hump pointed out. "Many people find good places to pray in the canyon." He was trying to be patient. After all, a man's prayers were serious. He himself had chosen a difficult place on a high rock when he had prayed for the success of the great raid. Red Hand had every right to pray on a rock pile if he wanted to. Buffalo Hump was merely curious as to why he had chosen this particular rock pile as his praying place.

What Red Hand wanted to do was change the subject. What had driven him to the rock pile to pray was the fact that one of his wives had got her blood on him--they had been coupling when her impure time came. When he pulled away from his wife and saw that he was red with blood he was so upset that he jumped on his horse and left the village. Red Hand was no longer a youth; he had four wives and he coupled with them as frequently as possible, but never before had he coupled with one of his wives when she was impure.

The wife it happened with was known as High Rabbit because she stepped so high in the dance--al her legs were thin like a jackrabbit's. High Rabbit was not an immodest woman; in fact she was the most circumspect of his wives. She insisted on a great deal of privacy before she would let Red Hand couple with her. High Rabbit was also horrified by what had happened. She ran quickly to her mother to find out what her fate would be. Sometimes women were driven out of the tribe or even killed for allowing men to come near them when they were impure.

Red Hand didn't know what High Rabbit's mother might have told her, because he had left the village immediately and had not been back. As soon as he came to a stream he washed himself many times, though he knew the washings would do little good. The impurity would strike him inside, where he couldn't wash it away. His assumption was that he would die soon; he wanted to pray as much as possible before his end came, and the rock pile seemed as good a place as any. In his mind contact with impure blood meant death and he wanted to hurry to a praying place and start praying. Some rattlesnakes had been around the rock pile when he arrived, but they soon went away.

Probably even the rattlesnakes knew of his impurity and hurried to their dens to dissociate themselves from it.

To Red Hand's surprise, he didn't die; now Buffalo Hump, leader of the great raid, had come upon him and seemed to find it amusing that he had chosen to pray on a rock pile. Of course Buffalo Hump didn't know about the dire thing that had occurred in Red Hand's lodge.

Red Hand would have liked a few ^ws with Worm about the matter of impure blood, but Worm had never liked him very much. Probably he would just tell him to go away and die if he knew about the blood.

Under the circumstances Red Hand thought it best to talk about something beside his choice of places to pray. Buffalo Hump was not a great chief for nothing. He might find out that Red Hand had come to the rock pile because he was stained.

"Kicking Wolf is back," Red Hand said.

"He was very weak when he found us and he sees two deer where there is one." Buffalo Hump was not concerned with Kicking Wolf's vision problems.

"Where is the Buffalo Horse?" he asked.

"I don't know about that, but the worst thing is that Three Birds did not return," Red Hand said. "The Black Vaquero got him." "If he got Three Birds, how did Kicking Wolf get away?" Buffalo Hump asked.

Then Red Hand realized that he did know what had happened to the Buffalo Horse--he returned in his mind to an earlier part of the story; he was so upset about his impurity that he could not remember events in a straightforward way. Now he suddenly remembered about the Buffalo Horse --an Apache had told Slipping Weasel about him. The Apache had heard the story from a man who was wandering.

"Wait, I was in my prayer, I forgot this," Red Hand said. "They cooked the Buffalo Horse in a great pit, but they took away his head and cooked it somewhere else. It took a whole village to eat him. I think Ahumado ate his head. They also caught Big Horse Scull and hung him in a cage." "I was wanting to know about Kicking Wolf," Buffalo Hump said, without impatience. He could tell that Red Hand's mind was in a disordered state. He was talking rapidly, although there was no need to hurry their talk.

"Ahumado did catch Kicking Wolf," Red Hand said. "He tied him to a horse and the horse almost dragged him to death. But Big Horse Scull cut him loose." "What did Ahumado do with Three Birds?" Worm asked.

"There are some stories about Three Birds but I don't know if they are true," Red Hand said. "An Apache said that Three Birds flew off the Yellow Cliff. He did not want to go in the cage where they put Scull." "I don't think Three Birds could fly," Buffalo Hump said. "I will ask Kicking Wolf about it myself. He may know more than that Apache." "He may, but since the horse pulled him he sees two deer where there is one," Red Hand told him.

On the ride home Buffalo Hump asked Worm about the things Red Hand had said, but Worm was not very informative. He was annoyed that Kicking Wolf had taken the Buffalo Horse to Mexico, to be eaten by a village.

"We could have cooked it in a pit ourselves," Worm said. "We could have eaten it as quickly as that village." Later, in camp, Buffalo Hump mentioned Worm's complaint to Kicking Wolf. The latter was having his hair greased by one of his wives, at the time.

"Worm thinks you should have let us eat the Buffalo Horse," Buffalo Hump said.

"If Worm had stolen it he could have eaten it, but I stole it and I wanted to take it to Mexico," Kicking Wolf said. "Anyway, Apaches are liars. The Buffalo Horse may still be alive." Buffalo Hump saw that Kicking Wolf was in a quarrelsome mood. He had been about to tease Kicking Wolf a little--af all, the man had missed the great raid--but he decided to let it be, mainly because he was anxious to see Lark and his other wives. Fat Knee had ridden ahead to let them know he was coming, so they would probably have cooked him something good. He wanted to eat.

Kicking Wolf he could tease anytime.

"How about Three Birds?" he asked, before going on to his tent. "Do you think he is still alive too?" At that Kicking Wolf merely shook his head.

He didn't think Three Birds was alive, and it was a sorrow to him.

"I didn't want him to go to Mexico," he told Buffalo Hump. "I was going to take the horse myself. I wanted Three Birds to go home, but he came to Mexico anyway. He wanted to be brave." Though Buffalo Hump had always considered Three Birds a fool, there was no doubt that what he had done had been very brave.

"He got his wish," Buffalo Hump said. "He was brave. When your eyes are better we will sing for him, some time."

When the wild black cow came popping out of a thicket of mesquite and chaparral, she was on them and had gored Deets's horse badly in the flank before the rangers even knew what kind of beast they were dealing with. The horse squealed and fell over, throwing Deets almost under the cow, whose horn tips were red with the horse's blood. The cow lowered her head when Call and Gus shot her, firing almost at the same time. The bullets knocked the cow to her knees but didn't kill her. Even on her knees she tried to go for Deets--it took a bullet to the head to kill her.

Deets was shaking, as much from surprise as from fright. His horse gushed blood from its torn flank.

"My horse dying," Deets said, stunned.

"Well, where'd she come from?" Pea Eye asked. All he could remember was that a black streak with short shiny horns came popping out of the brush--he had had no time to make precise observations.

"She came out of that!" Augustus said, pointing to what seemed to be an impenetrable thorny brush. The mesquite and chaparral grew out above a solid floor of green prickly pear.

"Maybe she had hydrophobie," Stove Jones volunteered. "I've lived with cows and such all my life, but I've never seen a cow charge a bunch of men like that." "Just be glad it wasn't one of them tough little black bulls," Lee Hitch said. "One of them little black bulls would have done for about half of us." "You can't kill a bull with no pistol bullet," he added. "Not even with ten pistol bullets." A mile or two farther--Deets was now riding double with Jake Spoon, who had the stoutest horse--they came upon three of the small black bulls Lee Hitch had described. Everyone in the troop drew their rifles, expecting to have to defend themselves, but the bulls were content to paw the earth and snort.

Then, just as they were about to stop for coffee and a bit of bacon, a second cow came shooting out of the brush behind them. This time the rangers were primed, but even so it took three rifle shots to bring the cow down.

In midafn it happened a third time. A red cow came charging directly at them, breathing froth and bellowing. All the rangers shot this time and the cow went down.

Call, though profoundly startled by the violent behaviour of the wild south Texas cows, held his counsel, meaning to talk the development over with Augustus privately, when they camped.

Gus McCrae couldn't wait for a private parley. They were scarcely south of San Antonio and had just been attacked three times, with the loss of one horse. They had seen no ranches or ranchmen who might advise them on the bovine behaviour they were encountering. The rangers were jumpier now than they would have been if they had been crossing the comancher@ia--in the space of an afternoon they had come to fear cattle more than they feared Indians. And it was the cattle of the country, hundreds of them, that they were supposed to round up and deliver to Mexico.

"This is pointless travelling," Gus said.

"How are we going to deliver a thousand cattle to that old bandit if we have to shoot ever damn cow we see?" Call accepted the point. It was obvious they had been presented with a difficult mission.

"There must be tamer cattle down here somewhere," he said. "There's ranches down this way--big ranches. They ship cattle to New Orleans regular, I hear. The boats come to Matagorda Bay. They don't shoot ever cow. There's got to be cowboys down here who know how to handle this stock." The rangers listened in silence, but his ^ws made little impression compared to their fresh memories of the mad, frothing cows.

"Livestock ain't supposed to be this hostile," Stove Jones commented.

"We're Indian fighters, Woodrow," Augustus pointed out. "Indian fighters and bandit chasers. We ain't vaqueros. If I tried to go into one of them thickets after a cow I'd be lucky not to get scratched to death. We'd just as well try to deliver a thousand deer. At least deer don't come charging at you.

"That damn governor's betrayed us again," he added in disgust.

Call couldn't really disagree. Governor Pease had given them a flowery letter to show to the ranchers in south Texas. The letter bound the state of Texas to compensate the ranchers for cattle sufficient to make a herd of one thousand head.

There was no mention, however, of a price per head.

When Call pointed this out to Governor Pease, the Governor had merely shrugged.

"Our south Texans are patriotic men," he said. "They'll be glad to let you take a few head of stock if it will get our hero back.

"Speak to Captain King," he added--two harried clerks were following him around at the time, hoping to get his attention. "Captain Richard King. He'll help you. I expect that goddamn old black bandit has stolen at least that many cattle from him already." "Where do we find Captain King?" Augustus asked. "I've never met the man." "Why, just ask, Captain McCrae--j ask," Governor Pease said. "Captain King is well known along the coast." The Governor's office was bustling that day-- besides the clerks and an army man or two, there were three benches packed with legislators, all of them evidently hoping for an audience with the Governor. As a lot they looked dusty and drunken.

"Look at them ramshackly senators," Augustus said, as they left the office.

"Maybe we ought to change jobs, Woodrow.

We could make laws instead of enforcing them." "I can barely read," Call reminded him.

"I'd be a poor hand at making laws." "Why, you wouldn't need to read," Gus said.

"We could hire a clerk to do the scribbling. All it takes to make laws is good sense. I could probably make better laws than that whole bunch sitting in there half drunk." "Maybe," Call said. "Maybe not." Governor Pease handed them the letter and sent them away. As they left, several of the legislators were attempting to crowd in his door.

Now, faced with the fact that they were barely out of sight of the Alamo and had already had to shoot three cows, Call remembered the Governor's advice.

"I expect we better try and find Captain King," Call said. "Maybe he'll want to lend the state of Texas some vaqueros for a week or two." "I don't know, Woodrow," Gus said.

"When I'm given a job that's downright impossible, my practice is to find a whorehouse and stay in it until my funds run out." "We don't need to find a whorehouse, we need to find a ranch house," Call said. "This is Captain Scull we're trying to rescue.

Captain Scull led us for quite a few years and got us out of plenty of hard spots. Now he's in a hard spot and we've got to do the best we can to bring him back." "Well, the fool would walk off to Mexico," Augustus said. He reloaded his rifle and kept a wary eye on the thickets, as they passed them.

The next day they did find a ranch house, but there was no one there except three womenfolk, some babies and small children, and two old Mexican men who had been left to do the chores.

A lanky woman with a baby at her breast and two toddlers clinging to her skirts just looked unhappy when asked where the menfolk were.

"They're off branding cattle," she said. "I expect they're south. They've been gone three weeks--I've been looking for them back but they ain't here." "South's a big place," Augustus remarked.

The woman just smiled a tired smile. "It's a brushy place too--y'll find that out once you leave here," she said. "I got goat and I got frijoles--y won't get much except goat and frijoles, not in this part of the country." The men ate outside, at a long table shaded by a great mesquite tree whose limbs seemed to spread over an acre. The woman who greeted them was named Hannah Fogg--she had a pretty younger sister who helped with the serving. Though the younger sister was shy as a deer, Gus did get her to reveal that her name was Peggy. Gus stole several glances at her during the meal and lingered over his coffee so he could steal several more.

As the men ate, Augustus began to notice children, peering out shy as mice, one under the porch, another behind a bush, two more who had managed to climb the big tree. Two, at least, were under the wagon.

"Why, there's a passel of children here," he said to Peggy--it was an excuse to speak to her. "Are all these little tykes Mrs. Fogg's?" But Peggy ducked her head and wouldn't say.

Hannah Fogg was not lying about the difficulties of the country south of her ranch house. For a day and a half more the rangers zigged and zagged in a southerly direction, proceeding from little clearing to little clearing. They were seldom long out of sight of cattle, but no more cows charged--^the cattle fled like deer the moment they saw the riders.

In the afternoon of the second day they heard the sound of men working and came upon the rancher Denton Fogg and his branding crew, which numbered more than twenty vaqueros. The cattle were held in a large clearing. Ropers slid into the herd and soon came out, dragging the animal to be branded.

Denton Fogg himself, drenched in sweat and lugubrious in appearance, applied the iron himself; he was not happy to be interrupted in his hot work by a party of Texas Rangers with a letter from the Governor asking for a donation of cattle to be driven into Mexico in return for Inish Scull.

He did read the letter, though, holding it carefully so his sweat wouldn't drip on it.

"This is a piece of worthless foolery, sir," he declared, handing the letter back to Call.

"The Mexicans steal half our cattle anyway and Ed Pease does nothing about it. Now he wants us to give them a thousand more? No thank you, sir--not my cattle." Call didn't like the man's tone.

"He's not asking you to give anything," he pointed out. "The state will pay you for your cattle." "If the state intended to pay for the cattle it should have provided you with cash money," the rancher said. "Have you got cash money, sir?" Augustus didn't care for the man's tone either.

"We're in a hurry to rescue our captain," he said. "We couldn't wait for a bunch of money to be gathered up. Don't you even trust the state of Texas?" "Nope, not the state and not Ed Pease, either," Denton Fogg replied. "I wouldn't give either one of them a cow. But I will sell cattle for cash on the barrelhead. Come back with the money and I can have a thousand head ready for delivery within the week." With that he walked off and picked a hot iron out of the branding fire.

"The fool, I feel like shooting him," Augustus said.

"We can't shoot a man just because he doesn't want to give away his cattle," Call said-- he was not without skepticism about the state's willingness to pay for the cattle.

"Well, he's out here branding ever cow he can catch," Augustus pointed out, "Who said he could take these cattle?" "I guess that's just how you build up a ranch," Call said. "The cattle belong to the man who gets to them first." "Hell, we could be ranchers ourselves then," Gus said. "We could hire a few ropers and buy some branding irons and get to work. Pretty soon we'd be big livestock men too." "Where'd we put the cattle once we branded them?" Call asked. "We don't own any land.

We don't even own the horses we're riding.

All we own are our guns and our clothes." "And the saddles," he added. "We do own our saddles." The comment depressed Augustus to an unusual degree. He liked to think of himself as prosperous, or at least prospectively prosperous--but the fact was he was just short of being a pauper. All he owned was three guns, a fairly well made saddle, and some clothes.

He had no house, no land, no wife, no livestock. He had ridden all day in the blazing sun, through thorny country, threatened by dangerous bovines and possibly even wild Indians, andfor what? A paltry salary that would scarcely see him through a month of whoring and imbibing.

"I say we quit the rangers," he said abruptly. "There's a fortune in cattle down here in this brush and we're letting fools like that one beat us to it." "If you want to get rich ranching you'll have to work as hard as that fellow Fogg--I doubt myself that you'd enjoy working that hard," Call said.

He rode over to where Denton Fogg was working --smoke rose from a brand he had just slapped on a large yearling.

"Do you know a man named Richard King?

Captain King?" Call asked.

"I know him," Fogg said, but did not continue --he moved on to the next yearling while the iron was still hot enough to impress a brand.

"Well, would you know where we could find him?" Call asked. "The Governor thought he might advance us the cattle we need." At that Denton Fogg stopped dead. He looked at Call for a moment and smiled--he even slapped his leg, in amusement.

"Dick King, give up a thousand cattle?" he said. "Dick King didn't get what he's got by giving away cattle." "He wouldn't be giving them, sir," Call said, trying his best to curb his impatience. "The state will pay him. I'd appreciate it if you would just tell me where I can find him." "I don't keep up with Dick King," Denton Fogg said, still amused. "There's a fellow in Lonesome Dove that knows him. You might ask him." Before he had quite worked through his amusement, he was off to the nearest branding fire, to select a fresh iron.

"Is Lonesome Dove a place?" Call asked. "I confess I'm not familiar with it." "You don't seem to be familiar with anything, Captain," Denton Fogg told him. "This is branding season--e cattleman who's got any sense is off branding every animal he can get his rope on. Dick King's branding, like the rest of us. I wish I had as many cattle as he does, but I don't, and I never will if I have to stand here all day giving directions to Texas Rangers.

Just go due south to the Rio Grande and turn left. You'll eventually come to Lonesome Dove.

There's a man there named Wanz who might know where Dick King and his men are branding." "Let's go," Call said to the troop. "That man's too busy branding cattle to bother with us." "The fool, I'd arrest him if there was a jail nearby," Augustus said.

"No, he's not a criminal, let's go," Call said. For a moment he keenly missed Long Bill Coleman. Though not a professional tracker, such as Famous Shoes, Long Bill had a good instinct for routes, and what they needed just then was to hold a true route south, to the Rio Grande.

But it was more than Bill's usefulness that Call missed--the man had been reassuring company, and a frontiersman whose opinion was always useful to have. The thought that he would never have it again made Call low spirited, for a time. If they were lucky enough to strike another ranch house he meant to try and hire an old vaquero to guide them through the brush.

"I've a notion to go back and marry that fellow's sister-in-law," Augustus said.

"Being married to her would be better than having this goddamn brush scratch your eyes out." "It's odd to be travelling without Billy Coleman, ain't it?" Call said. "It's the first time since we took up rangering that Billy ain't been along." Augustus started to agree, but before he could speak memory rose in him so powerfully that he choked on his ^ws. There was no more Long Bill to ride with. Memories of the missions they had been on together passed through his mind in a vivid parade; but then, to his dismay, the parade was interrupted by images of Clara. One second he would be remembering the tall, lanky man, white with dust, on their march as captives across the Jornada del Muerto--but then it would be Clara smiling, waiting for him on the back porch of the Forsythe store in her pretty gingham dress; Clara laughing, teasing, kissing. She had grown a little fuller in the bosom over the years, but otherwise she had been the same girl, from the moment in the muddy street when he had kissed her for the first time until he had bidden her goodbye, in the morning mist, behind the same store, only a few weeks ago. Clara hadn't gone where Bill was. It had already occurred to him that, life being the dangerous business that it was, she might be a widow someday; but, by then, his own life might have ended, or he might be in jail or in a war somewhere; anyway, even if Clara were once more to be free, she might turn him down again, as she just had.

"Why would the man hang himself, Woodrow?" Augustus asked, trying to force his mind back to the original topic.

"I know it's best not to think about it, but I can't stop thinking about it," he went on. "There are times at night when I'd give a year's wages just to ask Billy one question." "Well, but he's gone where wages don't help you," Call said. "The best thing is just to try and do the job we have to do." "I doubt we can do this job--where are we going now?" Gus asked.

"To the Rio Grande," Call replied.

"To the Rio Grande and then what--is Captain King a fish?" Gus asked.

"No, but there's a town there where we might be able to find him," Call said. "At least I guess it's a town." "Well, if it's a town, is it on a map --does it have a name?" Gus asked, impatiently. "Is it on this side of the river, or is it an island or what?" "It's probably a town," Call said.

"There's a saloon there owned by a man named Wanz--I think he's a Frenchman." "Oh, if it's got a saloon, let's go," Augustus said. "In fact, let's hurry.

We'll give the saloon a thorough inspection-- then we'll worry about Captain King. What's the name of this place?" "Lonesome Dove--t's its name," Call said.

The captives, three men and a woman, were brought in a little after sunrise, in an oxcart.

Mu@noz, the bandit Ahumado had assigned to do the job Tudwal once did, ambushed them in their fine coach three days to the east. All their finery, rings, watches, and the like he put in a little sack, for Ahumado to inspect. The first thing the old man did, before he so much as glanced at the captives, was take the sack from Mu@noz and carry it to his blanket. He emptied the sack and carefully inspected every item before he turned his attention to the prisoners, all of whom were large and fleshy, as hidalgos and their women tend to be, and all of whom, with good reason, were terrified.

Scull watched the proceedings from his cage, shielding his eyes with his hands. On days when they tied him to the skinning post his vision became a blur--he could distinguish motion and outlines but not much else. The rains had stopped and the sun was blinding, but Ahumado only now and then tied him to the skinning post. Often he would be left for three or four days in his cage--when free to shade his eyes, his vision gradually cleared.

Also, to his puzzlement, Ahumado instructed the women to feed him well. Every day he was given tortillas, frijoles, and goat meat. Ahumado himself ate no better. Scull suspected that the old man wanted to build him up for some more refined torture later, but that was just a guess and not one that impeded his appetite.

Live while you're alive, Bible and sword, he told himself. He observed that from time to time the Black Vaquero was racked with coughing, now and then bringing up a green pus. It was enough to remind Scull that the old bandit was mortal too. He might yet die first.

That was not a thought likely to bring comfort to the fat new captives. As soon as Ahumado had inspected the booty he had the four prisoners lined up in the center of the camp. He did not speak to them or question them; he just made them stand there, through the hot hours of a long day. The people of the village stared at them, as they went about their work.

Vaqueros or pistoleros who rode in from time to time stared at them.

Scull judged the captives to be gentry of some sort--theirthe dusty garments had once been expensive. Provincial gentry, perhaps, but still from a far higher sphere than the peasants who peopled the camp. The prisoners were used to being pampered; they spent their lives sitting, eating, growing fatter. They were unaccustomed, not merely to being prisoners, but to being required to stand up at all. They were too scared to move, and yet they longed to move. They were offered neither food nor drink. Mu@noz, a thin man with a pocked face, was clearly proud of his catch. He stood close to them, waiting for Ahumado's order. The standing was a torture in itself, Scull observed. In the afternoon the woman, desperate, squatted and made water; she was well concealed behind heavy skirts but still Mu@noz laughed and made a crude joke.

Later the three men made water where they stood, in their pants.

Scull watched Ahumado--he wanted to know what the old man would do with his prize catches.

The old skinner, Goyeto, sat beside him, clicking his finely sharpened knives, one of them the knife that had taken off Scull's eyelids.

A little before sundown, trembling with fatigue, the woman passed out. She simply fell facedown--in a faint, Scull supposed.

Ahumado did not react. Mu@noz had just filled his plate with food; he went on eating.

A few minutes later the three men were prodded at knifepoint to the edge of the pit of snakes and scorpions and pushed in. The bottom of the pit was in darkness by this time. The captives had no idea how deep the pit was. They were merely led to the edge of a hole and pushed off the edge. All of them screamed as they fell, and two of them continued screaming throughout the night. One of the men screamed that his leg was broken. He pleaded and pleaded but no one listened. The peasants in the camp made tortillas and sang their own songs. Scull decided that the third captive must have broken his neck in the fall--there were only two voices crying out for help.

In the morning, when Ahumado and Goyeto went to look in the pit, Scull heard the old skinner complaining.

"I thought you were going to let me skin one of them," he said.

Ahumado ignored the complaint--he usually ignored Goyeto, who complained often. He stood on the edge of the pit, looking down at the captives and listening to them beg him and plead with him; then he returned to his blanket.

When an old woman brought Scull a little coffee and two tortillas, he asked her about the men in the pit. He had noticed several of the women peeking in.

"Is one of the men dead?" he asked.

"S@i, dead," the old woman said.

The woman who fainted lay through the night in the place she had fallen. It had grown cold; Scull noticed that someone had brought her a blanket during the night. She was not tied. After the sun had been up awhile the woman rose and hobbled hesitantly over to one of the little campfires. The poor women of the camp made a place for her and gave her food. She thanked them in a low voice. The women did not respond, but they allowed her to sit by the fire.

Ahumado took no further interest in her. A week later, when all three of the men in the pit were dead, the woman was still there, unmolested, eating with the women of the camp.

When Blue Duck saw that his father was angry, he thought it might be because of the captive woman. The woman, who was young and frail, had been found dead that morning; but in fact she had been sickly when they took her. There had been some beating and raping but not enough to kill her. She had been sick all along, spitting blood night after night on the trail--now she had died of her sickness, which was not his doing or his fault.

As a chief, Buffalo Hump had always been touchy about the matter of captives; he expected to control the disposal of all captives. He might order them tortured or killed, he might sell them into slavery with another tribe, or he might let them live and even on occasion treat them well. The fate of a captive brought to Buffalo Hump's camp depended on reasoning Blue Duck did not understand. Even though he felt blameless in the matter of the dead woman, he was also scared. Everyone feared Buffalo Hump's anger, andwith good reason.

The ^ws his father said, though, shocked him. They were not what he had expected, not at all.

"You should have left Famous Shoes alone, as I ordered," Buffalo Hump said. "Now you have to leave the tribe. You can take five horses but you cannot come back to my camp again. If you do I will kill you myself." At first Blue Duck could not believe his father meant what he was saying. Was he going to banish him from the tribe because of a little foolery with a Kickapoo tracker? The Kickapoo had not even been harmed. Blue Duck had fought bravely on the great raid, killing several Texans in close combat. No young warrior had done better on the great raid, or fought more bravely.

He said as much, but Buffalo Hump merely stood and looked at him, a chill in his eye.

"We didn't hurt the Kickapoo," Blue Duck said. "We merely teased him a little. I thought Slow Tree might want him but he didn't so we let him go." Buffalo Hump didn't change expression.

He was not interested in arguments or explanations.

He had his big lance in his hand.

"Slow Tree heard me tell you to leave the Kickapoo alone," Buffalo Hump said.

"He did not want to assist you in your disobedience.

Now I am telling you to go. You have never been obedient and I have no time to argue with you or to correct your ways. If you stay I will kill you soon, because of what is in you that will not obey. You have courage but you are rude. Take the five horses and go away now. Any warrior who sees you near this camp after today has a duty to kill you." Blue Duck had not expected such a terrible judgment to fall on him so quickly. Yet it had fallen. Though he didn't really like many people in their band, it was the camp where he had always lived. He had always been where the tribe was; his roaming had seldom lasted more than a week. When he could not kill game there would be food in the camp. He felt a terrible anger at the Kickapoo, for having brought such a judgment on him. The next time he saw Famous Shoes he would kill him, and he would also like to kill Slow Tree, the fat chief who had been unwilling to torture Famous Shoes merely because Buffalo Hump had forbidden it.

But he could not think much about such things, not then, when his father still stood before him. He had his rifle in his hand; perhaps he should shoot his father right there. But he didn't shoot, or do anything at all. As always, when confronting his father, he felt a weakness in his legs and his belly. The weakness paralyzed him. He knew that if he tried to raise his gun and shoot, Buffalo Hump would be quicker. His father would shove the big lance into him. Blue Duck thought of murder but did nothing.

Buffalo Hump watched his son for a minute and then turned away. A little later he saw the boy ride out to the horse herd, to select his five horses. He looked dejected, but Buffalo Hump did not relent. He had returned home tired, only to have to listen half the night to stories of Blue Duck's bad behaviour.

The boy had beaten Hair On The Lip severely, though he had no right to. Hair On The Lip was still sore and could not move well.

Also, Blue Duck had followed Lark when she went into the bushes to make water, and had spoken to her rudely. Also he had raced a fine young horse that belonged to Last Horse's father. In the race he put the horse off a cutbank and it broke both its front legs. Of course it had to be killed and eaten; the old man was indignant and wanted a high price for the horse that had been lost.

Buffalo Hump had never been able to like his son and now he wanted to see him gone. He had never been obedient to the Comanche way, and never would. The bluecoat soldiers would be coming onto the llano to fight them soon, in a year or two; Buffalo Hump didn't want anyone in the camp who was only disposed to make trouble, as Blue Duck had.

Soon ^w of the banishment spread around the camp. Buffalo Hump was with Lark for a long time; when he came out he discovered that the men and women who came to visit him were more cheerful. All of them approved of what he had done. A few brought him new stories of Blue Duck's bad behaviour, mostly with women. Buffalo Hump was not especially disturbed by these stories. Many young warriors strutted too much with women and were not careful about marriage customs--he himself had almost been banished in his youth because of his lusts.

Later that day Fat Knee came hesitantly up to Buffalo Hump--it seemed that Blue Duck wanted Fat Knee to accompany him into exile. Blue Duck planned to go north and east, into a territory where renegades and exiles from many tribes gathered.

There were slavers there, and bandits. They watched the Arkansas River and picked off people who travelled in boats, or freighters who hauled goods in wagons. Blue Duck told Fat Knee they would soon be rich if they joined the renegades, but Fat Knee was hesitant.

"Isn't he gone yet?" Buffalo Hump asked.

"No," Fat Knee said. "He is still looking at the horses. He wants to take the best five." A wind had come up. Sand was blowing through the camp. It had been warm for several days but a cold wind was bringing the sand.

"You stay in camp," Buffalo Hump said.

"I will go drive him away." He found the whole business vexing. The fact that Blue Duck was still prowling around the horse herd was annoying, so annoying that Buffalo Hump caught his own horse, took his lance, and immediately rode out to the horse herd. Blue Duck's delay was merely one more example of his disobedience. Buffalo Hump thought it might be wiser just to kill the boy--talking to him that morning, his arm had tensed twice, as it did when he was ready to throw his lance. But he had held off-- exile should be enough--but now the boy had angered him by not leaving.

When he reached the horse herd the only person who was there was Last Horse--one of his mares had just foaled and he was watching for a bit, to see that no coyote slipped in and killed the foal.

"I thought Blue Duck was here," Buffalo Hump said.

Last Horse merely pointed upward to the rim of the canyon. A rider with five horses in front of him had climbed out of the canyon and was following the horses along the rim.

Buffalo Hump could barely see the rider through the blowing sand, but he knew it was Blue Duck, leaving.

"Whoa, now ... stop, boys!" Augustus said.

Far down the river, in the shallows, he saw something he didn't like; something blue. The creature was a good distance away, but it was rolling in the shallow water; Gus judged it to be an aquatic beast of some sort. Few land animals worried him, but he had long been afflicted with an unreasoning fear of aquatic beasts--and now one had appeared in the muddy Rio Grande, where, up to then, they had seen nothing more threatening than the occasional snapping turtle.

The rangers immediately stopped and yanked out their rifles. Thanks to the hostility, as well as the volatility, of the south Texas cattle, they had become well accustomed to yanking out their rifles several times a day. Gus McCrae was known to have exceptional eyesight; if he saw something worth calling a halt for, then it was best to look to their weapons.

"What is it?" Call asked. All he saw ahead of them was the brown Rio Grande. An old Mexican with three goats whom they came upon half an hour earlier assured them that they were nearly to the town of Lonesome Dove--Call was anxious to hurry on, in hopes that Captain King would be there. But Augustus apparently saw something that made him nervous, something Call could not yet see.

"It's blue and it's in the edge of the water, Woodrow," Gus said. "I expect it might be a shark." "Oh Lord, a shark," Stove Jones said, wishing suddenly that he had never left the cozy cantinas of Austin.

"It was a shark that swallowed Jonah, wasn't it?" Lee Hitch inquired.

"Shut up, you fool--t was a whale, and this river's too small for a whale to be in." Augustus kept his eyes on the blue object thrashing in the shallow water. It was an aquatic beast of some kind, that was for sure--now and then he thought he glimpsed the limb of a body; it might be that the shark was eating somebody, right before their eyes, or before .his eyes at least. None of the other rangers could see anything, other than the river, but they had grown accustomed to accepting Gus's judgment when it came to the analysis of distant events.

"If it's a shark, why are we stopped?" Call said. "It's in the water and we ain't.

Sharks don't walk on land, that I recall." "It might jump, though," Augustus said.

"If it jumped out of the water then it would die," Call pointed out. "Let's go." Call was about to ride past him when they suddenly heard brush popping from the Mexican bank of the river. In a moment two men and a bull emerged from the brush and plunged into the river. In a minute the bull, a large brown animal wearing a bell that clanged with every step, came out of the river and trotted straight into a thicket of brush, popping their limbs liberally as he went.

One of the riders was an American, a short man riding a fine bay gelding; the other was an old vaquero on a buckskin mare.

The short man pulled up in surprise when he saw the rangers but the old vaquero went right on into the brush, behind the bull. The rangers, who had been stopped by the brush a number of times in the last week, were as amazed by the vaquero's ability to penetrate the thicket as they were by the size of the bull that had just swum out of Mexico.

The American had bushy sideburns and a short, stiff beard. He surveyed the rangers carefully if quickly before he trotted up to where they were stopped.

"You're Call and McCrae, aren't you? And these are your wild ranger boys, I expect," the man said. "I'm Captain King. So you want a thousand cattle, do you?" Though Call had already suspected the short man's identity--several of the ranchers had described him, mentioning that he was partial to fine horses--he was surprised that Captain King not only knew who they were but what they wanted of him.

"Yes, but not as a gift," Call said. "The state will pay you for them." "I doubt that, but let's see the letter," Captain King said.

He observed that Gus McCrae seemed to be considerably less interested in the matter of the thousand cattle than was Captain Call. Gus McCrae was looking downriver, in the direction of Lonesome Dove.

Call produced the letter, which he had wrapped in oilcloth--two or three violent rainstorms had doused them lately. Inasmuch as the letter was their only hope of getting the cattle they needed, he wanted to make sure it didn't get wet.

"That was my bull Solomon you just saw--y'll not see his equal in America," Captain King said, taking the letter from Call. "He strayed off last night--tempted by a Mexican heifer, I suppose." He started to read the letter but then looked again at Gus.

"McCrae, you seem jumpy as a tick," he said. "What do you see that's upset you so?" "It's down the river and it's blue, Captain," Gus said. "I expect it's a shark." Captain King glanced at what Gus pointed at and immediately burst out laughing--j as he did a gust of wind took the Governor's letter out of his hand and blew it into the river. Before anyone could move it sank.

Call jumped off his horse and ran into the river--he was not a little vexed at Captain King, who sat astride his horse enjoying a fit of laughing. Call was able to pull the letter from the water, but not before it had become a sodden mess.

Call felt like giving Captain King a good dressing down, for being so careless with an important document, but it was hard to dress down a man who was laughing; and, anyway, Captain King was the one man who might help them succeed in their mission.

"I wish you'd read it before you let it blow in the river," Call said. He spread the letter on a good-sized rock; thinking it might dry if given time.

"I beg your pardon, Captain," Captain King said, attempting to control his amusement. "I don't usually throw letters into the river, particularly not if they're letters from a high potentate like Ed Pease. But I must say this is the best laugh yet. Captain McCrae here has mistook our blue sow for a shark." "Sow ... what sow?" Gus asked, annoyed by the man's jocular tone.

"Why, that sow," Captain King said, with a wave of his hand. "She probably caught a snake--a moccasin, perhaps. There's not much to Lonesome Dove but at least it's mainly clean of snakes. The sow eats them all--she's thorough, when it comes to snakes." "But Captain," Gus said, appalled by his mistake. "Whoever heard of a blue pig? I ain't." Captain King evidently didn't welcome challenges to his point of view--he looked at Augustus sharply.

"That's a French pig, sir," he said.

"She's silvery in the main, though I suppose she does look bluish in certain lights. She comes from the region of the Dordogne, I believe. In France they use pigs to root up truffles, but you'll find very few damn truffles in this part of the world--s mainly she roots up snakes. Madame Wanz brought her over, and a fine boar too. I expect the boar is off girling, like my bull Solomon. When you get a closer look you'll find she's unusually long legged, that sow. She ain't low slung, like these runty little Texas pigs. The long legs are for climbing hills, to seek out the truffles, which don't flourish in low altitudes." Call was listening carefully, impressed by Captain King's quick manner. Gus had had the rangers half spooked, with his talk of sharks, when it was only a pig in the water, downriver.

He didn't know what a truffle was, or why one would need to be rooted up.

"What is a truffle, Captain?" he asked, putting up the rifle he had pulled during the alarm.

"Truffles are edible delicacies, Captain," Richard King said. "I have not had the pleasure of digesting one myself, but Th@er@ese Wanz swears by them, and she's as French as they come." "If she's French, why is she here? This ain't France," Gus said. He was a good deal embarrassed by the matter of the shark that was only a sow; he felt sure he would be ribbed about it endlessly by the other rangers, once they got to town --if there really was a town.

"She should have stayed in France, and her pig too!" he said, in a burst of annoyance.

"They've got no call to be disturbing the local stock!" Captain King had been about to turn his fine bay horse and ride down the river, but he paused and looked at Gus sharply again.

"As to that, sir, you've got no call to be coming down here asking me for cattle when I'm hellish busy selecting worthy wives for my bull Solomon," Captain King said. "When was the last time you had a drink of whiskey, Captain?" "More than a week's passed--I last touched liquor before we struck this dern brush," Gus said.

"No wonder you're surly, then," Captain King said. He pulled a flask out of his saddlebag and offered it to Gus. Gus was startled --he politely wiped the top of the flask on his sleeve before taking a good swig and handing the flask back to Captain King. Lee Hitch and Stove Jones looked on enviously.

"Thank you, Captain," Augustus said.

"A man needs his grog," Captain King said. "I'm goddamn surly myself, when deprived of my grog." Call was annoyed with Gus. Why would he say a woman he had never met should have stayed in France? It was rude behaviour, though Captain King was mainly right about the grog. Gus McCrae was scarcely able to be good company now unless he had had his tipple. He was anxious, though, that the rude behaviour not obscure the fact that they needed Captain King's help if they were to secure the thousand cattle.

"Captain, what about the cattle?" he asked --but Richard King was too quick for him. He had already turned his horse and was loping down the river toward where the blue pig lay.

When the rangers finally rode into Lonesome Dove, the town they had been seeking, thicket by thicket, for several days, the wet blue sow, who was indeed large and long legged, followed them at a trot, dragging a sizable bull snake she had just killed.

"I wouldn't call this a town," Augustus McCrae said, looking around disappointed. There were four adobe buildings, all abandoned--despite what Captain King had just said about the sow's efficiency as a snake killer, the buildings all looked snaky to him.

"No, but it's a nice-sized clearing," Call said. "You could put a town in it, I guess." On the west side of the clearing a large white tent had been erected--near it, construction was under way on what was evidently meant to be a saloon. A floor had been laid, and a long bar built, but the saloon, as yet, had no roof. One table sat on the floor of the barroom-to-be; a small man dressed in a black coat sat at it. There was a tablecloth on the table, as well as a bottle of whiskey and a glass, although the small man did not seem to be drinking.

Outside the tent a small plump woman whose hair hung almost to the backs of her knees was talking volubly to Captain King.

"Do you reckon that bar's open, Gus?" Ikey Ripple asked.

Augustus didn't immediately comment. He was watching the blue sow suspiciously--on the whole he didn't trust pigs--but Stove Jones spoke up.

"Of course it's open, Ike," he said.

"How could you close a saloon that don't have no roof?" Before the matter could be debated further, Captain King came back.

"That tent belonged to Napoleon once," he said. "At least that's Th@er@ese's line. That's Xavier, her husband, sitting there at his table.

I guess the carpenters ran off last night.

It's put Th@er@ese in a temper." "Run off?" Gus said. "Where could a person run off to, from here?" "Anywhere out of earshot of Th@er@ese would do, I expect," Captain King said. "The carpenters in these parts ain't used to the French temperament, or French hair, either. They think Th@er@ese is a witch." Call looked with interest at the tent. He had not made much progress in the book Captain Scull had given him about Napoleon, but he meant to get back to it once his reading improved.

He would have liked to have a look inside the tent, but didn't suppose that would be possible, not with a talky Frenchwoman in it.

"It's a nuisance," Captain King admitted. "Now I'll have to go try to corral the carpenters--I expect it could take half a day." Just then a flock of white-winged doves flew over the clearing, a hundred or more at least.

Mourning doves were abundant too--the one thing that wouldn't need to be lonesome in such a remote place were the doves, Augustus concluded.

"Even if there was a town here I don't see why it would be called Lonesome Dove," he said.

"There's dove everywhere you look." Captain King chuckled. "I can tell you the origin of that misnomer," he said. "There used to be a travelling preacher who wandered through this border country. I knew the man well. His name was Windthorst--Herman Windthorst. He stopped in this clearing and preached a sermon to a bunch of vaqueros once, but while he was preaching a dove lit on a limb above him. I guess Herman took it as a holy omen, because he decided to stop wandering and start up a town." Captain King gestured toward the four fallen-in adobe huts.

"Herman was holier than he was smart," he said. "He lived here a year or two, preaching to whatever vaqueros would stop and listen." "Where is he now?" Gus asked.

"Why, in heaven I expect, sir," Captain King said. "Herman preached his last sermon about five years ago. He thought he had a nice crowd of vaqueros but in fact it was Ahumado and some of his men who stopped to listen.

As soon as Herman said "Amen"' they shot him dead and took everything he had." Captain King fell silent for a moment, and so did the rangers. Mention of the Black Vaquero reminded them of their dangerous mission.

"But they still call it Lonesome Dove--the name stuck," Call said.

"Yes sir, that's true," Captain King said. "The preacher's gone, but the name stuck. It's curious, ain't it, what sticks and what don't?

"I better get after those carpenters," he went on. "I need to get a roof on this saloon.

There's a fine crossing of the river, there--I can do some business in this town, once it gets built.

We need that roof--otherwise it will shower one of these days, and if Xavier ain't quick it will get his tablecloth wet." Augustus looked at the small man in the black coat, sitting stiffly with the bottle of whiskey, at the one table.

"What's he need a tablecloth for?" he asked. "Why worry about a tablecloth if you ain't even got walls or a roof?" "He's French, sir," Captain King said.

"They order things differently in France." Without further explanation he turned his horse and rode off.

"I wish he could have waited until we talked to him about the cattle," Call said, disappointed.

"I don't," Augustus said.

"Why not?" Call asked. "We've been at this two weeks and we don't have a single cow.

We need to get some and go." "ally need to, Woodrow," Gus said. "I don't. All I need is to see if that fellow with the tablecloth will sell this thirsty bunch some whiskey." Call was annoyed with Captain King for leaving before they could discuss the business at hand, and annoyed, as well, with Gus McCrae, for being so quick to seize every opportunity to loaf.

All the rangers dismounted and the older men headed for the roofless bar.

On impulse, Call loped after Captain King, thinking perhaps they could negotiate for the cattle while looking for the carpenters--it might speed things up a little.

Lee Hitch and Stove Jones began to feel anxious when they saw Call leaving.

"Now Woodrow's leaving ... what'll we do, Gus?" Lee asked.

"I'd like to get drunk, myself ... I suppose you can do as you like, Lee," Gus said.

It occurred to Lee that there weren't many of them.

What if the pistoleros who finished the preacher came back and went for them? With Call gone and Gus drunk, they might all be massacred.

"Yes, but then what?" he asked.

"Why, then, nothing, Lee," Gus said. "I guess we can all sit around and watch that French pig eat snakes."

"Inish Scull's just a Yankee adventurer," Richard King said directly, when Call overtook him. "He went up against Ahumado once with a strong force and he lost.

What the hell made him go back alone?" "I can't say, Captain," Call admitted. "We were on our way home and he just peeled off, with the tracker--the next thing we heard he was captured." "Speaking of peeling, what do you think of Madame Inez?" Captain King asked. "I hear she peels the pants off the lads quicker than I could core an apple." Call had managed to depart Austin without having accepted Madame Scull's invitation to tea.

He knew what Maggie thought about her, but what Madame Scull did was none of his business.

He had no intention of gossiping about her with Captain Richard King.

"I scarcely know her," Call said. "I believe the Governor introduced us once. I suppose she's anxious to have her husband back." "Possibly," Captain King said, eyeing Call closely. "Possibly not. As long as she has lads to peel she might not care. You're a circumspect man, ain't you, Captain?" Call was not familiar with the ^w.

"Means you don't gossip about your superiors, Captain--t's a rare trait," Captain King said. "I wish you'd quit the rangers and work for me. I need a circumspect man with ability, and I believe you have ability to go with your circumspection." Call was surprised by the statement. He knew little about Captain King just that he owned a vast stretch of land, south along the coast. The two of them had met scarcely an hour ago. Why would the man try to hire him on such short acquaintance?

Captain King, though, did not seem to expect a reply, much less an acceptance. The trail narrowed, as it entered the thick mesquite. The two of them had been riding side by side, but that soon ceased to be possible. Call fell in behind the Captain, who kept a brisk pace, ducking under the larger limbs and brushing aside the smaller. Call, less experienced in brush, twice had his hat knocked off. He had to dismount to retrieve it and in the process fell some ways behind Captain King. Fortunately the trail was well worn. He pressed on, as fast as he could, but, despite his best efforts, could not draw in sight of the Captain, or hear him, either. He was beginning to feel anxious about it--perh the trail had forked and he had missed the fork. Then he heard shouts from his left. Suddenly a large form came crashing at him, through the brush.

His horse reared and threw him against the base of a mesquite tree just as Solomon, Captain King's great brown bull, passed in front of them with a snort. Call just managed to hang on to his rein and stop his horse from bolting up the trail. As he fell a thorn had caught his shirt and ripped it almost off him, leaving a cut down one side. The cut didn't worry him but it was a nuisance about the shirt because he only had one other with him. The shirt was so badly torn he didn't think it could be mended, even though Deets was adept with needle and thread.

The great bull had passed on, its head up, its testicles swinging. The trees over the trail were so low that Call didn't immediately remount. He walked, leading his horse. Then he heard a sound and turned in time to see the old vaquero Captain King had put in charge of the bull slipping through the brush, in close pursuit of the great animal.

It was all puzzling to him: why would anyone try to raise cattle in a place where you could scarcely see twenty feet? Even if you owned ten thousand cattle, what good would it do if you couldn't find them? He wondered why Texas had bothered taking such brushy country back from Mexico. In his years of rangering he had become competent, or at least adequate, in several environments. He could ranger on the plains, or in the hills, or even in the desert; but now he had been thrust into yet another environment, one he was not competent in at all.

Captain King could move through the brush, the vaqueros could move through it, Solomon, the great bull, could move through it, but so far all he had done was get lost and ruin his shirt. He would have done better to have stayed with Gus and got drunk.

Just as Call was beginning to wonder if he should try to retrace his steps and at least get back to Lonesome Dove, he heard voices ahead of him. He went toward the voices and soon came into a sizable clearing. Captain King was there, talking to four black men who were sitting on the thick lower limb of a big live oak, their feet dangling.

"Why, there you are, Captain, what happened to your shirt?" Captain King asked.

"Thorns," Call said. "Are these the lost carpenters?" "Yes, Solomon kindly treed them for me," Captain King said. "They're not eager to come down while Solomon's in the vicinity. They don't think the treeing was kindly meant." "I don't blame them," Call said. "He nearly treed me." "Nonsense, that bull is gentle as a kitten most of the time," Captain King said. "I expect it was those Mexican heifers that stirred him up.

Anyway, Juan is taking him home. It's unfortunate about your shirt, Captain." The black men did not seem at all inclined to leave their limb. While they watched, Solomon trotted quickly through the clearing, with the old vaquero, Juan, right behind him. The bull did not look their way.

"See there, men, Juan's taking Solomon home," Captain King said. "He won't chouse you no more. It's perfectly safe to come down." The black men listened respectfully, but didn't move.

"Now, this is vexing, I don't know if Lonesome Dove will ever get built, though there's a fine river crossing there to be taken advantage of," Captain King said. "Between the bull and the French witch, these men are badly spooked. I don't suppose I could persuade you to lead them back to Lonesome Dove, could I, Captain?" "Well, I guess I could take them back, if they ever decide to come down," Call said.

"But what about the cattle to ransom Captain Scull?" Captain King simply ignored the question.

"I've decided to proceed to my headquarters," he said. "I'd be obliged if you'd take these men back. They've got a saloon to build, and then a house.

Th@er@ese Wanz will not be wanting to bivouac in Napoleon's tent forever." The black men, evidently feeling that the bull was now gone, began to edge off the limb.

Call was hoping that Captain King would at least make some proposal regarding the cattle. After all, the Governor had asked, even if his letter did get a little wet. It was annoying that Captain King felt he could simply disregard it. He seemed far more interested in the carpenters than in the fate of Captain Scull.

One by one the carpenters edged down the bole of the live oak tree. They were all elderly men, each carrying a small sack of possessions--not much.

"Captain Scull is my captain," Call said. "I'm obliged to try and rescue him if I can." Captain King only looked at him the more severely.

"I'm a blunt man, Captain," he said.

"I know Scull's rank and I know your mission.

In my opinion you and those tipplers back in Lonesome Dove could no more drive a thousand head of cattle to the Sierra Perdida than you could a thousand jackrabbits. I won't give you a cow, and besides that, I'm in the midst of the branding season and can't spare my vaqueros, either. [ that not enough, I happen to know that the state of Texas is broke, and I am not the sort of man who enjoys giving away livestock." "Well, Mr. Fogg said as much," Call told him.

"Oh, Denton Fogg, that gloomy fool," Captain King said. "He'll starve out in another year or two and have to take those spavined women back east." "You won't sell us any cattle, then, Captain?" Call asked.

Captain King, whose mind seemed to be elsewhere, swung his severe gaze back to Call.

"You're a persistent man, I see, Captain," he said. "Do you like Inish Scull?" "What, sir?" Call asked, surprised by the question.

"It's a simple question, Captain," Richard King said. "Do you like Inish Scull?" Call resented the question so much that it was all he could do to keep from simply riding off with the black carpenters. He didn't like Inish Scull, as it happened: the man had been rude to him too often. But that was his business, not Captain King's.

"The Governor gave us orders," he said.

"I mean to carry them out, if I can. I'd appreciate your help, but if I can't get it I've still got my orders to carry out." "I should have asked McCrae," Captain King said. "I expect I would have got an answer from McCrae. You do like McCrae, don't you, Captain? Will you admit that much?" "I had better take these men and head back to Lonesome Dove, Captain," Call said. "I don't want to get caught in this brush after dark." "I'm glad you didn't take me up on that job offer, Captain Call," Richard King said. "I fear we'd quarrel." "We would if you asked about things that are none of your business," Call said.

Captain King's look grew dark.

"Everything that happens in Texas is my business, Captain Call," he said.

"Everything! I trust you'll remember that." Without another ^w or look he turned his horse and left, disappearing into the brush at the point where the bull and the old vaquero had been.

Call found himself no wiser in the matter of the ransom than he had been when he left Austin.

They had no cattle, and could find no one who would let them have any. Yet another mission was tending toward failure.

Besides that, he was in the midst of the south Texas brush country, with four elderly black men who did not seem happy to have been left with him. He suddenly realized that he had failed to ask Captain King whether the men were slave or free.

If they were free he had no right to insist that they go back to Lonesome Dove with him. He decided just to ask them if they would come.

"I'm ready to go, men--are you coming with me?" he asked.

All the men nodded--they clearly didn't want to be caught in the brush after dark either.

"Missus Th@er@ese gonna whip us, though," the oldest of the men said.

"Oh, does she whip you, then?" Call asked. To his surprise the four men all smiled broadly.

"She get after us with the buggy whip," one said.

"Mister Xavier too, though," another commented.

"She get after Mister Xavier worse." "Her husband, you mean," Call asked.

The old black man nodded; the others looked suddenly fearful, as if they might have said too much.

Call didn't question them further--it would only embarrass them. As he rode back down the narrow trail he recalled that Madame Scull was said to go after the Captain with a bullwhip, when in a temper. Now here was another wife who whipped her husband--it struck him as strange. Though he and Maggie were not married, he could not imagine her behaving so.

"Well, at least it's just a buggy whip," he said.

None of the black men said anything.

"Get up, Monsieur. Make the liquors. The customer is here!" Th@er@ese Wanz said, flinging each ^w at her husband as if it were a small stone. Xavier Wanz, her husband, seemed to be thinking thoughts of his own; he continued to sit at the table with the white tablecloth, staring at his glass.

Th@er@ese, in only a few moments in her tent, had managed to sweep her abundant brown hair up on her head in an appealing mound; the gown she wore did not quite conceal her plump shoulders. Augustus McCrae, who had not expected to see a woman, much less an attractive woman, for several years, if ever, found that the sight of Th@er@ese brought an immediate improvement in his mood.

She stood in the middle of the barroom floor, hands on her hips, looking at the rangers cheerfully.

"See, already the customers," she said to Xavier. "Vite! Vite! Make the liquors." Xavier Wanz compressed his lips, and then, as if propelled by a spasm of fury, jumped from his chair and strode over to the tent, beside which a sizable mound of goods was covered by a large wagon sheet.

Xavier dove under the sheet like a rat seeking cover; for a moment, only his rump was visible, but, in the space of a minute, he emerged with two bottles of whiskey and several glasses. He hurried to the bar, set the bottles and glasses on it, and paused to straighten his cuffso.

"Messieurs," he said, bowing slightly, "the pleasures are mine." "If the bar's open I expect a few of those pleasures might be ours, too," Gus said.

Pea Eye declined the liquor and Deets wasn't offered any, but in a few minutes the other rangers, including young Jake Spoon, were all seated around the table where Xavier had sat.

At Th@er@ese's strident urging Xavier had applied himself again to the mound under the wagon seat and come out with several chairs.

"These glasses are clean," Gus said, in astonishment. "You could spend a week in the saloons of Austin and never encounter a clean glass." As soon as each glass was emptied, a process that didn't take long, Xavier appeared with a bottle, poured, and bowed.

"Monsieur," he said, invariably.

Ikey Ripple, who had passed easily and quickly into a state of profound inebriation, found himself a little put off by the bowing.

"Why's he bowing to us?" Ikey asked.

"To be polite--why shouldn't he bow?" Augustus asked.

"That's right, a bartender ought to bow," Lee Hitch said--alth, so far as he could remember, none of the bartenders of his acquaintance had ever bothered to bow to him before.

"I say it's a goddamn trick," Ikey declared. "I think he means to get us drunk and steal all our money." "Ikey, if you've got cash money on you, you don't need to wait for a Frenchman to steal it," Gus said. "Loan it to me and I'll invest it for you." "Invest it in whores--t's all you know about, Gus," Ikey said.

"Well, that way you wouldn't have to be anxious about it," Gus told him.

Th@er@ese Wanz, a smile on her lips, seemed to be studying the rangers closely. Pea Eye had elected to help Deets with the horses, but Jake Spoon had boldly taken his place at the table and was drinking whiskey as if he had a right to, a fact that annoyed Gus McCrae a good deal. Even more annoying was the fact that the Frenchwoman was looking at Jake with interest.

"Jake, you ought to be helping with the horses," Gus said, in an irritable tone.

Jake knew well that when Gus was out of temper it was better to walk small. He saw the Frenchwoman watching him, but didn't connect it with Gus's angry tone. After all, the woman's husband was standing right behind her.

Th@er@ese decided right away that she liked Monsieur McCrae, but she saw nothing wrong with flirting a little with the curly-headed boy.

Opportunities to flirt were limited in Lonesome Dove.

Opportunities to make money were no less rare, and Th@er@ese liked money. Captain and Th@er@ese liked money. Captain King assured her there would soon be a brisk trade in the town--he seemed to think that merchants would rush to Lonesome Dove in order to take advantage of the fine river crossing, but, so far, very few merchants had appeared, a fact which frustrated Th@er@ese's commercial instincts severely.

Now, at the sight of the tired, dusty, unshaven men, Th@er@ese began to think in terms of money.

She quickly decided that the first task would be to barber them--they could all use shaves and two or three of them needed haircuts as well.

"Xavier! The woods, monsieur!" she said crisply, with a glance at her husband. "I want to shave these men and give them the hair-offs." Xavier Wanz, severely depressed as he was by the many differences between Texas and France, walked over to a campfire that smouldered in front of the tent. He would have preferred, himself, to sit at the table all day, enjoying the seemliness of his clean tablecloth, and perhaps drinking just enough liquor to blind himself to the ugliness of the mesquite trees that surrounded the clearing where, if Captain King was to be believed, a town would one day exist.

Th@er@ese, of course, had her own ideas; every day Lonesome Dove presented some new challenge to her energies, and her energies were not small. Every day, in this new land, Th@er@ese arose, impatient; every day Xavier was the man who bore the brunt of her impatience. Yesterday, Th@er@ese's impatience had overflowed and scared away the carpenters; today, at least, there were these men to occupy her, these rangers. If she wanted to barber them it was fine with him.

With his foot he nudged a few more sticks of firewood into the fire, before returning to his bar.

"Hair-offs--hair-offs!" Th@er@ese said, coming to the table. "You first, monsieur," she said, tapping Augustus on the shoulder.

"All right, I'll volunteer--d I get a shave too?" Gus said.

Th@er@ese didn't answer--she had already marched off to her tent. When she emerged, carrying a razor, a razor strop, and several other tools of the barbering trade, she pulled another chair from under the wagon sheet and insisted that Gus sit on it.

The rangers, most of them now drunk, watched with interest as Th@er@ese vigorously stropped her razor.

"I'm shaggier than Gus, she ought to have barbered me first," Stove Jones complained.

"What you complaining about? I'll be lucky to even get a shave," Lee Hitch said, well aware that his bald head offered little incentive to a barber.

Jake Spoon gulped down what was left of the whiskey and went off to sit with Pea Eye and Deets. It .was vexing that Gus McCrae seemed to get the first attentions, if a woman was around. Now the woman was wrapping Gus in a sheet and cooing over him as if he were something special. The sight put Jake in such a hot mood that he picked up three clods and threw them at the blue sow, who had consumed the bull snake and had flopped down under a small bush to rest. The clods missed but Xavier Wanz noticed and immediately walked over to Jake.

"Monsieur!" he said sternly. "Do not disturb the pig." "That's right, it ain't your pig, don't be chunking it," Gus said, from his barber chair. "That pig's the pride of the community--it needs its rest." His pride stung, Jake walked straight past Pea Eye and on toward the river. He had merely thrown three clods at a sow. What right had Gus to speak to him in such a tone? He felt like quitting the rangers on the spot. He could hammer and saw; maybe the French couple would hire him to carpenter. With Gus gone the Frenchwoman might even come to like his curly hair, as Madame Scull once had.

Perhaps she would take him up and teach him the language; he imagined how chagrined Gus McCrae would be if, the next time the rangers stopped in Lonesome Dove, he and Madame Wanz were chattering in French.

"Where do you suppose he's going?" Pea Eye asked, when Jake walked past.

"Could be going to take a wash," Deets said.

"Now you've run Jake off, picking on him," Lee Hitch remarked.

"The pup, he's welcome to drown himself for all I care," Gus said, well aware that he was the envy of the troop, by virtue of having been chosen to receive the first haircut.

Th@er@ese Wanz, though flirtatious in her approach to barbering, was all seriousness when she got down to the business itself. She decided to start with the shave and promptly lathered Gus's face liberally with a nice-smelling soap.

"Boy, this beats that old lye soap," Gus said, but Th@er@ese rapped his head sharply with her knuckles, indicating that the time for talk was over.

Th@er@ese then shaved him carefully and expertly, not omitting to do some careful work under his nose. Then she wrapped his face in a hot towel and began the haircut, moving his head this way and that, touching him, making him sit up straighter, or insisting that he turn one way or another. With the hot towel steaming on his face and Th@er@ese's deft hands working it with scissors and comb, Gus drifted into a kind of half sleep, in which he allowed himself to imagine that it was Clara doing the barbering. On occasion, dissatisfied with the work of the local barbers, Clara had barbered him, sitting him down on the steps behind the store and scissoring away until she had him looking the way she wanted him to look, a process that took much squinting and inspecting.

Th@er@ese Wanz, more expert than Clara, was also more decisive. When she took the hot towel off his face she produced some small tweezers and began to yank the hairs out of his nose. Gus had never had his nose hairs interfered with before. He was relaxed, half asleep, and a little drunk--the first extraction took him so completely by surprise that he yelped.

His companions had been watching the barbering operation closely, all of them filled with envy. When Th@er@ese yanked out the first nose hair Gus's reaction struck them as the funniest thing they had ever seen. They howled with laughter. Lee Hitch was so amused that a chair could not hold him--he lay on his back on the floor of the saloon, laughing violently. Stove Jones laughed nearly as loud. Far down the street, Jake Spoon heard the laughter and turned, wondering what could be so funny.

Pea Eye and Deets, who had been trimming a gelding's hoof, had not been paying too much attention to the barbering. When they saw the Frenchwoman pulling hairs out of Gus's nose they began to laugh too.

Augustus McCrae, who had been in a pleasurably relaxed state, found that he had suddenly become an object of wild amusement to the men. Th@er@ese, though, brooked no resistance; she finished his nose to her satisfaction and began to yank hairs out of his ears, oblivious to the laughter from the saloon.

She proceeded briskly with her tweezers, seizing a hair and extracting it with the same motion.

Xavier Wanz, standing stiffly behind a bar, thought the men he was serving must be crazy. He had never heard such desperate laughter, and at what? Because his wife was giving their captain the hair-offs? Not knowing quite what to do, he contented himself with folding and refolding his little white towel several times.

The hairs out, Th@er@ese began to rub Gus with an unguent whose smell she liked. The young monsieur had nice hair; she felt she might enjoy entertaining him in her tent for a bit, if only Xavier could be distracted, which didn't seem likely.

Meanwhile, there was business. Once she had combed Gus's hair the way she considered that it ought to be combed, she took the sheet off him and announced that he could stand up.

"One dollars, monsieur," she said. "Now you look like a fine cavalier." Augustus was somewhat startled by the price; he had not expected to pay more than fifty cents for his barbering, in such a place. Many a whore would cost little more than the haircut. But Th@er@ese smiled at him and whisked him off with her little brush. He liked her plump shoulders--why be tight?

"A bargain at the price, ma'am," he said, and paid her the dollar.

When Call came back to Lonesome Dove with the four carpenters he was surprised to find that the whole troop had been barbered and shaved. Pea Eye was just rising from the chair when he rode up.

Only Deets, watching silently from a seat on a stump, had not been worked on. All the men were preening as if they had just come out of church.

Th@er@ese Wanz, the woman who had clipped the considerable pile of hair that was around the barber chair, was bent over a large washtub, wringing out a towel.

"Ma'am, you need to strop your razor--here's one more," Gus said. "I'll take your horse, Woodrow--y've got a treat in store." Madame Wanz was evidently a woman of cheerful temperament. She sat Call down and poured out a torrent of French.

"Do you know what she's saying?" he asked Augustus.

"Just keep still and do your duty, Woodrow," Gus said.

Madame Wanz made a little bow when she sat Call in the barber's chair. He felt a touch of embarrassment; he had heard of women barbers but had never been worked on by one before. All of the men were in high good humour. They looked more presentable than they had looked in months.

"I expect you better shear me," Call said. "It'll probably be a good spell before I see a barber again." Call had relaxed and slipped into a half doze by the time Th@er@ese Wanz got around to the extraction of his nose hairs. He jumped so violently at the first jerk of the tweezers that he turned the barber chair over--all the men, who had been watching for just such a reaction, exploded with laughter. Augustus laughed so hard he had to hold his side. Even Call had to smile. It must have been funny, seeing him tip over a barber's chair.

"I wish we had old Buffalo Hump here," he said. "I expect he'd think this was a pretty fancy torture." Th@er@ese, undeterred, sat him down again and applied the tweezers until his nose was plucked clean of hairs.

Later, when they were all cleaned up enough to look almost as respectable as Xavier Wanz's tablecloth, Th@er@ese proved that she was as skilled a cook as she was a barber. A sizable flock of half-wild chickens chirped amid the crumbling adobe huts. Th@er@ese snatched four of them, collected a great number of eggs, and made them all a feast which included potatoes.

The men ate so much they could scarcely stumble off the floor of the saloon-to-be, where the feast had been served on a folding table Xavier had produced from under the wagon sheet.

"If people knew they could get fed like this, Lonesome Dove would be a town in no time," Gus said.

"I wouldn't mind moving here myself. It would save the expense of all that high-priced Austin liquor." "Yes, but what would you do for cash?" Call asked. "It's fine eating, but there'd be no one to pay you a wage." Th@er@ese had put two candles on the folding table. Other than their flickering light, the only illumination came from the high moon.

"Captain King expects there'll be businesses here someday, because of the fine river crossing," Gus said. "If there's businesses here, I guess we could have one too." "Speak for yourself," Call said. "I'm a Texas Ranger and I aim to stay one." "Now that's a damn boresome point of view," Gus said. "Just because we started out being rangers don't mean we have to stay rangers all our lives. The army will whip out the Indians in a few more years and there won't be much to do, anyway." "Maybe, but there's plenty to do right now," Call said.

"Mr. Xavier, now he's a curious fellow," Gus said. "He's been standing behind that bar all day and he's still standing behind it." Call looked. Sure enough, Xavier still held his position behind the long bar, although all the rangers had either fallen asleep or left the floor of the saloon.

"Between the barbering and the liquor they made a pretty penny on us today," Call said. "I expect they'll soon prosper." The two of them strolled away from the unbuilt saloon and the camp where their comrades slept, and meandered toward the river. They heard the water before they saw it, and, when they did see it, it was only the flicker of moonlight here and there on the surface.

"Lonesome Dove will need a whore or two, otherwise it won't grow," Augustus allowed.

"Prosperous businessmen won't long tolerate the absence of whores." "You can't tolerate it, you mean," Call said.

"That's one reason you'll never be a prosperous businessman." "Well, I just wasn't meant to work at one trade all my life," Augustus said. "I'm too fond of variety." "If you like variety I don't see how you can beat rangering," Call said. "A month ago we were freezing on the plains, trying not to get scalped, and now we're off to Mexico, where we'll be hot and probably get shot." "Is the Captain sending the cattle?" Gus asked. "If he is, I hope they don't come for a day or two. A little more of that woman's cooking might improve my cowboying." "He's not sending the cattle--no interest," Call said.

"No interest?" Gus said, astonished. "No cattle? What are we going to do, Woodrow?" They both stood looking across the river, at Mexico, the dark country.

"Maybe the Captain's already escaped," Gus said. "He's sly, the Captain. He could be halfway home by now." "He might be halfway dead, too," Call pointed out.

"If we can't raise the cattle, what do we do?" Augustus asked. "Go after him anyway, or give up again?" "You're a captain, same as I am," Call said. "What do you want to do? The two of us might go in alone and sneak him out." "Why, yes, and pigs might cuss," Gus said. "What'll happen is we'll get caught too--andthe state of Texas won't bother sending no expedition after us." Still, once he thought about it, something about the adventure of trying to rescue Captain Scull appealed to him, and the thought of a herd of cattle did not.

"It's getting to be the fly season, Woodrow," Gus said.

Call waited. Augustus didn't elaborate.

"What's your point?" Call asked, finally.

"We can't stop the seasons from turning." "No, but we could avoid cattle during the fly season," Gus said. "A thousand cattle would attract at least a million flies, which is more flies than I care to swat." "We don't have them anyway," Call said.

"And if Captain King won't give them to us, nobody will. Anyway, he's right. We could no more drive a thousand cattle across Mexico than we could a thousand jackrabbits." "That's right, we ain't vaqueros," Gus said.

The two of them fell silent, looking across to Mexico. Though they quarrelled frequently, they were often tugged by the same impulses, and so it was at that moment by the slow river. The longer they looked across it, the more strongly they felt the urge to attempt their mission alone--without cattle and without the other men.

"We could just do it, Woodrow--the two of us," Augustus said. "We'd have a better chance than if we take the cattle or the troop." Call agreed.

"I'm game if you are," he said. "I think it's about time we made something of ourselves, anyway." "I'd just like to travel with less company, myself," Gus said. "I don't know about making something of ourselves." "Buffalo Hump's held the plains ever since we've been rangers," Call pointed out.

"We've never whipped him. And Ahumado's held the border--we've never whipped him either.

We can't protect the plains or the border either --t's poor work in my book." "Woodrow, you're the worst I've ever known for criticizing yourself," Gus said. "We've never rangered with more than a dozen men at a time.

Nobody could whip Buffalo Hump or Ahumado with a dozen men." Call knew that was true, but it didn't change his feeling. The Texas Rangers were supposed to protect settlers on the frontier, but they hadn't. The recent massacres were evidence enough that they weren't succeeding on their job.

"You ought to give up and open a store, if you feel that low about it," Augustus suggested.

"There's a need for a store, now that the Forsythes are dead. You could marry Mag while you're at it and be comfortable." "I don't want to run a store or marry either," Call said. "I'd just like to feel that I'm worth the money I'm paid." "No, what you want is to take a big scalp," Gus said. "Buffalo Hump's or Ahumado's. That's what you want. Me, I'd take the scalp too, but I don't figure it would change much." "If you kill the jefe it might change something," Call argued.

"No, because somebody else just as mean will soon come along," Gus said.

"Well, we rarely agree," Call said.

"No, but let's go to Mexico anyway," Augustus said. "I'm restless. Let's just saddle up and go tonight. There's a fine moon.

Without the boys to slow us down we could make forty miles by morning." Call felt tempted. He and Augustus at least knew one another's competencies. They would probably fare better alone.

"What's your hurry?" he asked Gus.

"Why tonight?" "If I stay around I expect that Frenchwoman might fall in love with me," Gus said. "Her husband might fight me--it'd be a pity to get blood on that nice tablecloth." "Do you suppose the boys can find their way back to Austin, if we leave?" Call asked.

"Ikey Ripple claims to have never been lost," Augustus reminded him. "I expect it's a boast, but I think we should put him to the test. If the other boys don't want to try it with Ikey, they can stay and help build the saloon. The town would grow quicker if they had a saloon that didn't expose you to the weather--if the saloon had a roof and there was a whore or two and a livery stable, Lonesome Dove might be a place somebody might want to live." "The boys will be right surprised, when they wake up and find us gone," Call said.

"A little startlement would be better than being caught by Ahumado," Gus pointed out. "From what I've heard, he ain't gentle." The white moon soared over Mexico. The longer the two men looked, the stronger beckoning they felt from the unknown land.

"If we had cattle I'd try it the way we were supposed to," Call said. "But the fact is we don't." When they got back to the saloon the two candles had been blown out and the Wanzes had retired to their tent.

"I doubt that tent really belonged to Napoleon," Call said. "He was the emperor. Why would he give it up?" "He might have just liked Th@er@ese, if he'd met her," Augustus said. "I like her myself, even if she did pull hairs out of my nose." Deets was the only man awake when the two of them were saddling their horses and selecting a few provisions. At first he supposed the two captains were just going off on a scout; when Call came over and informed him that they were going to try and rescue Captain Scull themselves, Deets's eyes grew wide. He knew it was not his place to question the action of his two captains, but he could not entirely suppress his apprehension.

"We way down here in the brush," he said.

It wasn't that Deets felt exactly lost --x was just that he didn't feel exactly safe.

The big Indian with the hump might come--or, if not him, someone just as bad.

Call felt a little guilty as he gathered up his gear. He was usually the one impatient to leave, but this time it was Augustus who was in a sweat to get started. Call felt he ought to wake up one or two of the men and let them know what was happening, but Augustus argued against it.

"These men have been drinking ever since we got here," he pointed out. "They're drunk and they're asleep--let's just go. They ain't new calves, they're grown men. I doubt we'll be gone more than a few days. If they don't want to head back to Austin, they can stay here and wait for us." Several loud snores could be heard, as they talked.

Call felt that they ought to leave instructions, but again Gus protested.

"You don't always have to be telling people every single thing to do, Woodrow," he complained. "They need to work up some independence anyway. If we wake 'em up they might quarrel and start punching one another." "All right," Call said. It didn't feel quite right, but there was logic in what Gus said.

Pea Eye woke up, as the two captains talked. He saw them mount and ride out of camp; in a minute or two he heard their horses take the river. But it was not an unusual thing. Captain Call particularly often rode off at night, to scout a little. Pea Eye supposed it was no more than that, and went back to sleep.

When Ahumado saw the small hole in his leg, with the little ring of rot around it, he knew that Parrot had been at work. Parrot had sent the small brown spider who hides to bite him; when he first saw the hole, which was in the lower part of his leg, he was surprised. He had always been respectful of Parrot, as he had of Jaguar.

It was hard to know why Parrot would have the Spider Who Hides bite him--but the evidence was there.

When Ahumado bent over he could smell the rot, and he knew it would get worse. Soon he might have no leg; he might merely have a bone where the leg had been. The flesh of his leg would rot and turn black. Parrot liked to joke --what had happened might only be Parrot's joke. Parrot was older than humans, and had no respect for them. He was capable of complicated jokes, too. The whites had always called Ahumado the Black Vaquero, despite the fact that he had no interest in cows.

He only bothered taking them to annoy the Texans, who prized cows highly. He didn't like horses, either, except to eat, yet the whites considered him a great horse thief, though he only stole horses to trade them for slaves. Still, all the whites called him the Black Vaquero. Parrot knew such things--s now Parrot had sent Spider Who Hides to make his leg black. It was one of Parrot's jokes, probably. The Black Vaquero would at least have a black leg.

Ahumado did not reveal his injury to anyone.

He sat on his blanket, as he always did, watching the great vultures soar across the face of the Yellow Cliffs. There were fewer vultures now, because Ahumado had stopped hanging men in the cages, men the vultures could eat. Only a few of the vultures, or the eagles, still flew along the cliff, waiting to see if Ahumado would cage a man for them to eat.

Ahumado sat as he had always sat, listening, saying little. The wound in his leg was very small yet; no one had noticed it, or smelled the rot that would soon spread. Once he had thought the matter over for a day or two, Ahumado realized that it was more than just one of Parrot's jokes. Parrot had sent Spider to call him home; Parrot and Jaguar wanted him to leave the Yellow Cliffso, to stop harrying the whites with their thin cattle; Parrot and Jaguar wanted him to return to his home, to the jungle, where great serpents rested in the vine-covered temples. There was a broad tree near one of the temples, a tree with a great hole in it. Lightning had hit the tree and burned it away inside, so that there was a space in the tree large enough for a person to live in. When Ahumado was young an old woman had lived in the tree: her name was Huatl and she was a great curandera, so great that she could even cure the bite of the Spider Who Hides. In his youth Ahumado had often seen old Huatl; she lived in the split tree, near his home. She had told him that he would live long but that in his old age it would be his duty to return to the place of the split tree. When it was time for him to finish with his life as a human being, he was to lie near the tree with the hole in it; then he would sink into the earth and become a root. Lightning would come again and burn the great tree where Huatl lived. That tree would burn up but another tree would grow from the root that had once been the man Ahumado.

That tree would live for a thousand years and become the tree of medicines. The people would come in their weakness or illness to the tree of medicines and be cured.

In that tree would be all knowledge, all that Huatl and all the other great healers knew.

For three days Ahumado watched the tiny hole in his leg become larger; he watched as the ring of rot spread. On the third day he heard a sound deep in his ear and looked up to see Parrot fly like a red streak across the face of the cliff. He thought the sound in his ear was from Jaguar, who was somewhere near.

Ahumado knew then that he had been summoned. He was spending his last day in the canyon of the Yellow Cliffs. None of the people in the camp knew this, of course. The women went on with their work, washing clothes in the stream and making tortillas. The men played cards, drank tequila, quarrelled over dice, and tried to get the women to couple with them. Scull crouched in his cage, sheltering his lidless eyes from the sun. It was hundreds of miles to the jungle, to the place of temples. Ahumado knew he had better get started. He wanted to get across the first mountains before his leg became too bad.

He knew that by the time he reached the home of Jaguar he would have no leg. He meant to take a good hatchet with him, so he could make himself a crutch when his leg failed. That night he would crawl through a hole that only he knew about--the hole would take him through the belly of the cliff; it would take him past the dark men. He told no one; he would merely vanish--in the morning there would be no Ahumado. He would travel over rocks and leave no track. None of the people would know where he went. He would simply be gone.

There was only one thing left for Ahumado to do, in the canyon of the Yellow Cliffso, and it involved old Goyeto, the skinner.

"Sharpen your knives," he told Goyeto.

"You had better get them as sharp as you can. They need to be very sharp today." Goyeto brightened, when he received those instructions. They had taken no captives lately; there had been no one to skin. But now Ahumado wanted him to make the knives sharp.

He wanted the knives to be very sharp. It must mean that he had at last decided to let him skin the white man, Scull. There was no one else who was a candidate for skinning.

So Goyeto set about to make his little knives sharp--while Ahumado sat on his blanket, Goyeto whetted his knives, with skill. When they were ready he brought them to Ahumado, who tested them one by one. He used fine threads from his blanket, cutting the threads with the mere touch.

"Are we going to skin the white man?" Goyeto asked. "I'll have him tied to the post, if you want." When Ahumado turned to face him Goyeto's heart almost stopped, from the look that was in Ahumado's eyes. Goyeto did not even have the strength to stammer. He knew he had been discovered; an old sin, one he had committed many years before with one of Ahumado's women, on a blanket amid the horses, had been found out.

Goyeto had long feared discovery--Ahumado was jealous of his women--but Ahumado had been one hundred miles away, on a trip to catch slaves, when the woman coaxed him onto the blanket. She was a lustful woman; she had tried to coax him onto the blanket many times, but Goyeto had been too fearful of Ahumado's vengeance. He had only coupled with the woman that once.

When Ahumado turned his snakelike look on him, Goyeto knew who the knives had been sharpened for. He jumped up and tried to run, but the vaqueros quickly caught him. At Ahumado's command they took all his clothes off and tied him to the post where he had practiced his delicate art for so long. Goyeto felt such a fear that he wanted to die. No one but himself knew how to skin a man--if one of the crude young pistoleros tried to skin him it would just be butchery; they would hack his flesh off, with his skin.

Then Ahumado himself rose from his blanket and took the knives. He stuck them one by one into the post above Goyeto's head, so that, as one became dull, he could take another.

"Parrot told me what you did with my woman," Ahumado said. "He told me in a dream. I have watched you skin people for many years. I am your pupil in this matter. Now we will see if I have learned well." Goyeto didn't plead. He was so frightened that all ^ws left his mind and became screams.

Ahumado began at his armpits and began to work downward. Old Goyeto had a big stomach-- Ahumado thought such a stomach would be easy to skin, but it wasn't. Goyeto screamed so loudly that people became confused and began to flee the camp. It was not merely the loudness of the screams that confused them, either. Ahumado was skinning the skinner --no one knew what it meant. It might mean that he was tired of them, that he meant to skin them all.

If they ran he might merely shoot them, which would be better than being skinned.

Goyeto's voice wore out long before Ahumado worked downward to the part that had been active in committing the sin, years before on the horse blanket. Goyeto's mind broke; he spewed liquids out of his mouth that mixed with his blood. Ahumado tried to skin one of his ears but Goyeto didn't feel it. He died in the afternoon, well before the sun touched the rim of the Yellow Cliff. Disappointed, Ahumado stuck all of Goyeto's skinning knives in him, and walked away.

There were only a few people left in the camp by then; a few old women, too crippled to run, and one or two of the older vaqueros; all of them hated Goyeto and wanted to see how long he would last. Like Ahumado, they were disappointed.

The other person left was the white man, Scull. He had not watched the skinning. It was a bright day. He had to crouch with his arms over his head to keep the brightness from burning his brain. Scull knew what happened, though. Ahumado had seen him glance once or twice at the skinning post.

Scull noticed that people were leaving the camp. It was only when dusk fell and deep shadows filled the canyon that Scull could look. Ahumado had returned to his blanket--a few old women sat by the fires.

In the night, when the camp slept, Ahumado went to the cage where Scull was kept. Scull flashed his white eyes at him but didn't speak.

Neither did Ahumado. Goyeto, dead, hung from the skinning post. Even some of the old women had begun to hobble away. Ahumado pulled the cage, with Scull in it, toward the pit of snakes and scorpions and, without delay, pushed it over the edge. He heard it splinter when it hit the floor of the pit. There was no sound from Scull, but Ahumado heard the buzz of several rattlesnakes as he walked away.

Ahumado took his rifle and his blanket and moved quickly until he found the hole that led through the belly of the mountain.

By morning, when old Xitla woke and began to stir the campfire, the vultures had begun to curl down into the camp, to feast on Goyeto; but Ahumado, the Black Vaquero, was gone.

As Scull listened to Old Goyeto's screams he wondered what had occurred. The skinner was being skinned, that much he could see, although he only glanced up once or twice. He could not risk more; not with the sun so bright. But Ahumado was doing the skinning and, to judge from the intensity of Goyeto's screams, doing it badly on purpose. Where the skinner, Goyeto, had only taken skin, Ahumado pulled away strips of flesh, and did it so cavalierly that Goyeto soon wore out his voice and his heart. He died well before sunset, only partially skinned.

Once the shadows came Scull could risk more looks--he saw that almost all the people in the camp were leaving, unnerved by the unexpected execution of Goyeto.

Then, once it was dark, Ahumado suddenly appeared and began to push the cage toward the pit.

He didn't speak; Scull didn't either. The two had contested in silence so far; let it stay silent, Scull thought, though he was disturbed by what was occurring. He had seen men hurled into the pit and had heard their dying screams. He didn't know how deep the pit was--perh he would be killed or crippled by the drop. He knew there were snakes in the pit because he could hear them buzzing; but he didn't know how many snakes, or what else might be there. Once Ahumado appeared there was no time to reflect or plan.

Ahumado didn't even glance at him, or speak ^ws of hatred and triumph. He just pushed the cage a few feet and, without ceremony, shoved it over the edge of the pit.

The darkness Scull fell into was soon matched by the darkness in his head. He heard snakes buzzing and then he heard nothing. The cage turned in the air--he landed upside down and struck his head sharply on one of the wooden bars.

When he came to, it was night--in the moonlight he could see the opening of the pit above him. Scull didn't move. He heard no buzzing, but didn't consider it prudent to move.

If there was a snake close by he didn't want to disturb it. In the morning he could assess matters more intelligently. There was dried blood on his cheek; he assumed he had cut his head when the cage hit bottom. But he was alive.

At the moment his worst affliction was the stench.

The rich Mexicans who had died in the pit were still there, of course, and they were fragrant. But he was alive, Bible and sword; under the circumstances, phenomenal luck. It could easily have been himself, and not Goyeto, at the skinning post.

The pistoleros, the vaqueros, the young men of the camp, and the young women seemed to have gone. Always at night there would be singing around the campfires; there would be laughter, quarrels, the sounds of flirtation, drunkenness, strife. Sometimes guns were fired; sometimes women shrieked.

But now the camp above him was silent, a fact which bothered Scull considerably. To be alive, after such a drop, was exhilarating; but after relief and euphoria came terrible thoughts.

What if they had all left? The old man might just have pushed him into the cage and left him to starve. The walls of the pit looked sheer. What if he couldn't scale then? What would he survive on? What if no rains came and he had no water?

From exhilaration he slid toward hopelessness; he had to will himself to stop, to collect his thoughts.

Intelligence, intelligence, he told himself.

Think! The fact that he was in a hard situation didn't mean the final doom was come. At least in the pit he could shade himself, and the rangers might be well on their way with the cattle. With Ahumado gone all they would have to do was ride in and hoist him out of the pit.

Slowly, Scull's panic subsided. He reminded himself that in the pit there was shade; the torture of sunlight would be avoided.

Finally a gray light began to filter into the air above the pit. The stars faded. Scull looked first for the snakes and saw none. Perhaps they were hiding in crevices. The dead men were far gone in rot. Fortunately his cage had splintered and he soon freed himself of it. The stench all but overcame him; he thought his best bet to contain it would be to scoop dirt over the bodies. If he could cover them over with dirt it would cut at least some of the smell. He pulled loose a couple of bars, from his cage, to use as digging instruments.

He could dig at the side of the pit until he had enough dirt to cover the bodies. Though not particularly fastidious, he felt that a day or two of the stench might unhinge his mind.

He was just about to begin digging at the wall of the pit when he heard the buzzing again and realized he had been wrong about the snakes. The light was gray and so was the dust in the pit--in the gray dust the snakes were almost invisible. One large rattler had been resting not a yard from where he stood. The snake started to crawl away, only rattling a little, not coiling, but Scull leapt at it and crushed its head with his stick. He knew he had to be careful. His eyes were apt to water when he focused too long on one thing. He couldn't see well enough to spot the snakes. He edged around the perimeter of the pit and killed three more snakes before he was done. Then he began to dig at the walls. By noon, when he had to quit and hide his eyes, the dead Mexicans lay buried under sizable mounds of earth. Before burying the men Scull held his nose with one hand and forced himself to investigate their pockets. He was hoping Ahumado had overlooked a pocketknife, or another file, but in that he was disappointed. All he got off the corpses was their belts.

From time to time he dug, heaping more dirt on the corpses, but his time in the cage had weakened him; he could not dig long at a stretch, and no matter how careful he was, dirt got into his lidless eyes. The dust and dirt felt as painful as if it were gravel. Finally he took off his shirt, tied it over his eyes, and dug at the walls blindly.

By the afternoon, exhausted, he huddled in the shade.

One of his ankles was inflamed. He had seen several scorpions and wondered if he had been bitten by one during the night, when he was unconscious. He saw no sign of a bite, but the ankle was very sore, which chastened him. The pit seemed to be only fifteen feet deep, only some three times his size. Perhaps he could dig a few handholds and pull himself out. But his throbbing ankle, coupled with his exhaustion and the beginnings of a fever, brought home to him again the desperate character of the situation. No sound at all came from what had been, only the day before, a bustling camp.

There might be no one left to bring him water or food. The rangers might not have been able to get the cattle; no help might be coming. The pit he was in, though not really deep, was just deep enough to constitute the perfect trap for a man in his condition. Even if he could dig the handholds, he might not have the strength to climb out; his ankle would scarcely bear his weight. He could eat the snakes he had killed, but, after that, he would have nothing. Every day he would get a little weaker, and have less and less hope of effecting his own escape.

Barring a miracle, Ahumado had beaten him after all. The old man had even robbed him of time. As soon as Ahumado noticed that Scull was keeping a little calendar of twigs, he moved the cage and scattered the twigs. It was a thing to brood about. Ahumado had known that time meant something special to his prisoner. Now and then he would approach the cage and say, "Do you know what day it is, Captain?" Scull refused to answer--but Ahumado knew that Scull's hold on time had been broken.

"I know what day it is," he would say quietly, before returning to his blanket.

That night, as Scull's fever rose, he dreamed of a flood. He dreamed that water filled the pit to its brim, cool water that allowed him to float free. "Forty days and forty nights," he mumbled, but he awoke to dry sunlight and pain in his eyes. The dirt he had got in them the day before left them swollen.

"Noah," Scull said, aloud. "I need what Noah had. I need a flood to raise me up." His own ^ws sounded crazy to him. As his mind swirled, touching the edges of madness, he suddenly thought of Dolly, his Dolly--Inez to the world but always Dolly to him. Even at that moment, as he lay starving in a scorpion pit in Mexico, she probably was in a bed or a closet, stoking her own fires with some stout illiterate lad.

"The black bitch!" he said.

Then, anger pulsing through him, he yelled the ^ws as loudly as he could: "The black bitch!

The bitch!" The sound echoed off the cliffso, where a few buzzards still circled.

Then, dizzy from his own spurt of anger, Scull sat back against the wall of the pit, exhausted. In his mind he saw exactly how the handholds should be dug, in an ascending circle around the pit. He stood five foot two; he only needed to raise himself a bit over ten feet to escape--nothing to what Hannibal had faced with his elephants at the base of the Alps. Yet it was those ten feet that would defeat him. His eye saw the way clearly, but his body, for the first time in his life, would not respond.

Scull dozed; the heat of the day began to fill the pit. Soon it felt hot as a stovepipe to him. His fever rose; he felt chill even as he sweated. Once he thought he heard movement above him. He thought it might be a coyote or some other varmint, inspecting the camp, hoping to find a scrap to eat. He yelled a time or two, though, on the off chance that it might be a human visitor.

His yells produced no answer. Scull stood up, to test his ankle, but immediately sat back down. His ankle would bear no weight.

Then he began to get the feeling that he was not alone: someone was above him, waiting where he couldn't see them. But the person, if it was a person, waited quietly, making no sound. Through the afternoon he turned his sore eyes upward a few times, but saw no one.

Then, as dusk was approaching, he saw what he had sensed. A face, as old and brown as the earth, was visible above him. Then he remembered the old woman. He had seen her often during his days of captivity in the cage, but had paid her little mind. Most of the day the old woman sat under a small tree, silent. When she rose to do some chores she walked slowly, bent almost double, supporting herself with a heavy stick. He rarely saw anyone speak to her. No doubt the people of the camp had left her to die--crippled as she was, she would have been an impediment to travel.

"Agua!" he said, looking up at her. The sight of a human face made him realize how thirsty he was. "Agua! Agua!" The old face disappeared. Scull felt a flutter of hope. At least one human knew where he was, and that he was alive. There was no reason for the old woman to help him--she was probably dying herself. But she was there, and people were unpredictable. She might help him.

Above him old Xitla crept about the camp.

She was glad the people had left--the camp was hers now. She had spent the day looking for things people had dropped as they were leaving. People were so careless. They left things that they considered had no use, but old Xitla knew that everything had a use, if one were wise enough to know the uses of things. In a few hours of looking she had already found a bullet, several nails, an old shirt, and a rawhide string.

These things were treasures to Xitla. With each find she hobbled eagerly back to her tree and put her treasure on her blanket.

In her years in Ahumado's camp Xitla had been careful never to tell him her name. She knew he would kill her immediately if he knew that her name was Xitla and that she was the daughter of Ti-lan, a great curandera who had known him in his youth in the south. Her mother had insisted that she take the name "Xitla" because it would protect her from Ahumado. When he was a baby, her mother told her, the elders had put a poisoned leaf under Ahumado's tongue and sent him out in the world to do evil. Though Ahumado did not know it, he and Xitla had been born on the same minute of the same day, and their mothers were sisters-- thus their destinies were forever linked together. They would die on the same moment of the same day too--in killing Xitla, Ahumado would have killed himself.

But Ti-lan, her mother, when she sent Xitla away, warned her that she was never to tell Ahumado her real name, or the circumstances of her birth. If Ahumado knew he would try to challenge his destiny by putting Xitla to death in some cruel fashion. He bore the legacy of the poisoned leaf and would do much evil as a result.

A few years back Xitla thought Ahumado had found her out. He seldom rode a horse, yet one day for no reason Ahumado mounted a strong horse and rode the horse right over her, injuring her back, so that she could never again stand straight. He had never explained his actions.

He had merely ridden over her and left her in the dust. Then he dismounted and was never seen on a horse again. He had forbidden the people to help her, too. Xitla had crawled away on her hands and knees and found roots and leaves that helped her pain to be less.

Around the camp, Xitla was known as Manuela. Because it was understood that Ahumado disapproved of her, she had few friends. Sometimes drunken vaqueros, men so debased that they would use any woman, or even a mare or a cow, came and pawed at her in the night. She had been small and dark but very beautiful; the vaqueros saw something of her beauty and still pawed at her, even though she had passed her time as a woman.

One or two of the other old grandmothers in the village spoke to her; they were too old to care about Ahumado or his wrath. Xitla's one companion was a small white cat. The little cat grew and became her hunter. It brought her the fattest rats and even, now and then, a baby rabbit, a delicacy Xitla cooked in her pot, seasoned with good spices. Her cat was Xitla's companion. It slept next to her head at night, and its thoughts went into her brain.

The cat wanted her to leave the camp and go to a nearby village. But Xitla was afraid to go.

She moved so slowly that it would take her many days to reach the village--once Ahumado knew that she was gone he might send his pistoleros to catch her and put her on one of the sharpened trees --t was the penalty for those who left without permission.

A few weeks later her cat left the camp to hunt and never came back. A woman told her, much later, that Ahumado had caught it and given it to a great rattler he kept in a cave --Xitla never knew whether the story was true.

Even though she was old many women in the camp were jealous of her, because of her great beauty. Sometimes in the night Xitla felt her cat trying to send its thoughts into her brain, but its thoughts were not clear.

Another woman told her that the story about the great rattler was nonsense; there had been an old cougar living near the camp; the cougar had probably eaten her cat.

This old woman, Cincha, had merely wanted gossip, Xitla thought. Like everyone else in the camp, Cincha was curious about Xitla and Ahumado. They wanted to know why the Black Vaquero hated Xitla so much; and why, if he hated her, didn't he just kill her. None of them knew about the sisters, or the poisoned leaf, nor did they know the real reason for Ahumado's hatred, which was simple. Once in his youth Ahumado had tried to come to her in the way of a man and she had stuck him in his member with a green thorn. She had been using the thorn to sew and had merely stuck Ahumado with it because she did not want to be with him in that way.

The green thorn had poison in it and the poison went into Ahumado's member. He had several wives, but none of them were happy--there were stories and stories, but Xitla didn't know if they were true. She just knew that Ahumado hated her so badly that he had run over her with a horse.

Now, to her surprise, Ahumado had been the one to leave the camp. He told no one that he was leaving. There was much speculation but no one really knew why Ahumado did the things he did. Within a day, all the other people in the camp left too.

No one offered to take Xitla. They had simply left her on her blanket. The women were particularly anxious to leave her--they did not like it that Xitla had such beauty of face still.

Xitla had been asleep, dreaming of Parrot, when Ahumado pushed the white man into the pit. When she awoke she heard the white man speaking to himself and knew that he was still alive.

The white man had survived as Ahumado's captive for many weeks--he had a strong spirit in him; he might yet find a way to escape the pit. She could not resist peeking at him, in the pit, and it was then that he asked her for water.

There were three or four pots laying around the camp, pots people had left in their careless haste.

Xitla took one of the pots and filled it with water from the stream. Then she searched through her treasures until she found enough rawhide string to make a cord long enough to lower the water to the white man. It would please her to help the prisoner in the pit, but when she lowered the water and looked at the man she realized it would not be easy to save him --he was very weak. He was on the point of giving up, this man, but Xitla hoped that a little cool water and some food would bring his spirit back its strength.

It took Xitla a long time to get the water, moving slowly as she did, and she was careful when she lowered it into the pit. When the white man stood up to catch the jug Xitla saw that one of his ankles was injured. He could not put his foot on the ground without pain, a fact which complicated his escape. It would be hard for him to climb out of the pit with such a sore ankle.

Xitla decided to take her blanket and go to the little cornfield by the stream. The corn was young, but it was the only food close to the camp that she might bring him. She would pile some of the soft corn on her blanket and drag it to the pit, so that the man would have something to eat. She could stay alive on very little, and the white man could too or he would have already starved.

"Gracias, gracias," Scull said, when the water jug was safely in his hands. He took the water in little sips, just a drop or two at a time, to soothe his swollen tongue. His tongue was so thick that he could barely speak his ^ws of thanks.

It was a good sign that Scull was careful with the water, Xitla thought. He was disciplined; if she could get him a little corn his spirit might revive.

That night Xitla listened carefully to the animal noises around the camp. She wanted to be awake in case Ahumado came back.

He had always been a night raider; he struck at the most peaceful hour, when people were deep in restful sleep. Young women, dreaming of lovers, would not know anyone was there until the hard hands of the pistoleros took them away into slavery, far from their villages and their lovers. People were not alert enough to sense the approach of Ahumado, but animals could sense it. All the animals knew that Ahumado had been given the poison leaf, and did evil things. Sometimes he made Goyeto tie up animals and skin them, for practice. The animals knew better than to let such an old man catch them. The coyotes stayed away, and the skunks and even the rats. The night birds didn't sing when Ahumado was around.

Xitla listened carefully, and was reassured.

There were plenty of animals out that night, enjoying the bright moon. Just beyond the cornfield where she meant to go in the morning with her blanket there were some coyotes playing, yipping at one another, teasing and calling out. She watched a skunk pass by, and heard an owl from a tree near the cliff.

Hearing the sounds of the animals made Xitla feel peaceful, content to doze by her little fire of twigs and branches. She didn't know where Ahumado had gone, or why, but it was enough, for the moment, to know that he was far away. In the morning she would go to the cornfield with her blanket and pick some young corn for the white man, Captain Scull.

Th@er@ese Wanz was much put out when she emerged from the white tent and discovered that Captain Call and Captain McCrae had left Lonesome Dove in the night. She had been up early, gathering eggs in her basket from hens' nests in the crumbling house left by Preacher Windthorst. She liked the two young captains; having them there was a fine change from the company of her husband, Xavier, a man disposed to look on the dark side of life, a man who had little natural cheer in him or even a satisfactory amount of the natural appetites all men should have.

Frequently, due to his gloom, Th@er@ese had to sit on Xavier in order to secure her conjugal pleasures. Xavier was convinced they would starve to death in the Western wilderness they had come to, but Th@er@ese knew better. In only one day, with the rangers there, they had made more money than they would have made in France in a month, doling out liquor in their village for a few francs a day.

All day the rangers had drunk liquor and paid them cash money, a fact not lost on Xavier, who threw off his gloom long enough to accord Th@er@ese a healthy dose of conjugal pleasure without her having to go to the trouble of sitting on him.

She sprang up early, ready to make the rangers a fine omelette and collect a few more of their dollars, only to discover that the two rangers she liked best had ridden off to Mexico. Only the black man had seen them leave; the other rangers were as startled as Th@er@ese to discover they were gone.

"You mean they left us here?" Lee Hitch asked.

"Yes sir," Deets said. "Gone to get the Captain." "That's all right, Lee," Stove Jones said.

"I imagine they expect us to wait, and at least we'll be waiting in a place where the saloon don't close." "It'll close if Mr. Buffalo Hump shows up," Lee said, with an apprehensive look around the clearing. Toward the river the blue sow and the blue boar were standing head to head, as if in conversation. Xavier Wanz was attempting to fasten a bow tie to his collar, a task that soon reduced him to a state of exasperation.

At the mention of Buffalo Hump, Jake Spoon came awake with a start.

"Why would he show up, Lee?" Jake asked.

"There ain't a town here yet--he wouldn't get much if he shows up here." "My tooth twitched half the night, that's all I know," Lee Hitch said. "When my tooth twitches it means Indians are in the vicinity." "Goddamn them, why did they go?" Jake said, annoyed at the two captains for leaving them unprotected. Since the big raid on Austin his fear of Indians had grown until it threatened to spoil his sleep.

Pea Eye was shocked that Jake would use such language in talking about Captain Call and Captain McCrae. They were the captains--if they left, it was for a good reason.

Then, to Pea Eye's surprise, the Frenchwoman began to wave at him, beckoning him to come help her prepare the breakfast. She was breaking eggs into a pan, and swirling it around; her husband, meanwhile, took out his tablecloth, from a bag where he kept it, and spread it on the table, smoothing it carefully. The man had on a bow tie, which struck Pea Eye as unnec, seeing as there was only a rough crew to serve.

"Quick, monsieur, the woods!" Th@er@ese said, when Pea Eye bashfully approached. He saw that the cook fire was low and immediately got a few good sticks to build it up. As Th@er@ese swirled the eggs in the pan her bosom, under the loose gown, moved with the swirling motion. Pea Eye found that despite himself his eyes were drawn to her bosom. Th@er@ese didn't seem to mind.

She smiled at him and, with her free hand, motioned for him to bring more sticks.

"Hurry, I am cooking but the fire is going lows," she said.

Though it was so early that there were still wisps of ground fog in the thickets, Lee Hitch and Stove Jones presented themselves at the bar, expecting liquor. To Pea Eye's amazement Jake Spoon stepped right up beside them. Only the night before Jake had confided in him that he didn't have a cent on him--he had lost all his money in a card game with Lee, a man who rarely lost at cards.

Xavier Wanz put three glasses on the bar and filled them with whiskey; Jake drank his down as neatly as the two grown men. Both Lee and Stove put money on the bar, but Jake had none to put, a fact he revealed with a smile.

"You'll stand me a swallow, won't you, boys?" he asked. "I'm a little thin this morning, when it comes to cash." Neither Lee nor Stove responded happily to the request.

"No," Lee said bluntly.

"No one invited you to be a drunkard at our expense," Stove added.

Jake's face reddened--he did not like being denied what seemed to him a modest request.

"You're barely weaned off the teat, Jake," Lee said. "You're too young to be soaking up good liquor, anyway." Jake stomped off the floor of the saloon, only to discover another source of annoyance: the Frenchwoman had summoned Pea Eye, rather than himself, to help her with the cook fire. The woman, Th@er@ese, was certainly comely. Jake liked the way she piled her abundant hair high on her head. Jake sauntered over, his hat cocked back jauntily off his forehead.

"Pea, you ought to be helping Deets with the horses--I imagine they're restless," Jake said.

To his shock the Frenchwoman suddenly turned on him, spitting like a cat.

"You go away--ride the horses yourself, monsieur," she said emphatically. "I am cooking with Monsieur," she said emphatically.

"I am cooking with Monsieur Peas. You are in the way. Vite! Vite!

"Young goose!" she added, motioning with her free hand as if she were shooing away a gosling that had gotten underfoot.

Mortified, Jake turned and walked straight down to the river. He had not expected to be rudely dismissed, so early in the day; it was an insult of the worst kind because everybody heard it--Jake would never suppose such a blow to his pride would occur in such a lowly place.

It stung, it burned--the high-handedness of women was intolerable, he decided. Better to do as Woodrow Call had done and form an alliance with a whore--no whore would dare speak so rudely to a man.

The worst of it, though, was having Pea Eye chosen over him, to do a simple chore. Pea Eye was gawky and all thumbs; he was always dropping things, bumping his head, or losing his gun --yet the Frenchwoman had summoned Pea and not himself.

While Jake was brooding on the insult he heard a splashing and looked down the river to see a group of riders coming. At the thought that they might be Indians his heart jumped, but he soon saw that they were white men. The horses were loping through the shallows, throwing up spumes of water.

The man in the lead was Captain King, who loped right past Jake as if he wasn't there.

The men following him were Mexican; they carried rifles and they looked hard. He turned and followed the riders back toward the saloon.

When he arrived Captain King had already seated himself at the table with the tablecloth, tucked a napkin under his chin, and was heartily eating the Frenchwoman's omelette. One of the vaqueros had killed a javelina. By the time Jake got there they had the little pig skinned and gutted. One of the men started to throw the pig guts into the bushes but Th@er@ese stopped him.

"What do you do? You would waste the best part!" Th@er@ese said, scowling at the vaquero. "Xavier, come!" Jake, and a number of the other rangers too, were startled by the avid way Th@er@ese and Xavier Wanz went after the pig guts. Even the vaquero who had killed the pig was taken aback when Th@er@ese plunged her hands to the wrists in the intestines and plumped coil after coil of them on a tray her husband held. Her hands were soon bloody to the elbow, a sight that caused Lee Hitch, not normally a delicate case, to feel as if his stomach might come up.

"Oh Lord, she's got that gut blood on her," he said, losing his taste for the delicious omelette he had just been served.

Captain King, eating .his omelette with relish, observed this sudden skittishness and chuckled.

"You boys must have spent too much time in tea parlors," he said. "I've seen your Karankawa Indians, of which there ain't many, anymore, pull the guts out of a dying deer and start eating them before the deer had even stopped kicking." "This is fine luck, Captain," Th@er@ese said, bringing the heaping tray of guts over for him to inspect. "Tonight we will have the tripes." "Well, that's fine luck for these men--while they're eating tripe I'll be tramping through Mexico," he said. "Some thieving caballeros run off fifty of our cow horses, but I expect we'll soon catch up with them." "You could take us with you, Captain," Stove Jones said. "Call and McCrae, they left us. We ain't got nothing to do." Captain King wiped his mouth with his napkin and shook his head at Stove.

"No thanks--taking you men would be like dragging several anchors," he said bluntly. "Call and McCrae were unwise to bring you--they should have left you to the tea parlors." He spoke with such uncommon force that none of the men knew quite what to say.

"It was the Governor sent us on this errand," Lee Hitch said finally.

"He just wanted to get rid of you so he could claim he'd tried," Captain King said, with the same bluntness. "Ed Pease knows that few Texas cattlemen are such rank fools as to deliver free cattle to an old bandit like Ahumado. He takes what livestock he wants anyway." "It was to ransom Captain Scull," Stove Jones reminded him.

Captain King stood up, wiped his mouth, scattered some coins on the table, and went to his horse. Only when he was mounted did he bother to reply.

"Inish Scull is mainly interested in making mischief," he said. "He got himself into this scrape, and he ought to get himself out, but if he can't, I imagine Call and McCrae will bring him back." "Well, they left us," Lee Hitch said.

"Yes, got tired of dragging anchors, I suppose," the Captain said.

He motioned to his men, who looked dismayed.

They had cut up the javelina and prepared it for the fire, but so far the meat was scarcely singed.

"You will have to finish cooking that pig in Mexico," he informed them. "I cannot be sitting around here while you cook a damn pig. I need to get those horses back and hang me a few thieves." With that he turned and headed for the river. The vaqueros hastily pulled the slabs of uncooked javelina off the fire and stuffed them in their saddlebags. A couple of the slabs were so hot that smoke was seeping out of their saddlebags as they rode away.

Th@er@ese and Xavier Wanz began to cut up the pig guts, stripping them of their contents as they worked. Xavier had taken off his black coat, but he still wore his neat bowtie.

Lee Hitch and Stove Jones were both annoyed by Captain King. In their view he had been rude to the point of disrespect.

"Why does he think we sit around in tea parlors?" Stove asked.

"The fool, I don't know--why didn't you ask him yourself?" Lee said.

"Lord, Mexico's a big country," Augustus said. It was a warm night; they had only a small campfire, just adequate to the cooking they needed to do. Just after crossing the river, Call had shot a small deer--meat for a day or two at least. They were camped on a dry plain, and had not seen a human being since coming into Mexico.

"The sky's higher in Mexico," Gus observed; he felt generally uneasy.

"It ain't higher, Gus," Call said.

"We've just travelled sixty miles. Why would the sky be higher, just because we're in Mexico?" "Look at it," Gus insisted. He pointed upward. "It's higher." Call declined to look up. Whenever Gus McCrae was bored and restless he always tried to start some nonsensical argument, on topics Call had little patience with.

"The sky's the same height no matter what country you're in," Call told him. "We're way out here in the country--y can just see the stars better." "How would you know? You've never been to no country but Texas," Gus commented. "If we was in a country that had high mountains, the sky would have to be higher, otherwise the mountains would poke into it." Call didn't answer--he wanted, if possible, to let the topic die.

"If a mountain was to poke a hole in the sky, I don't know what would happen," Gus said.

He felt aggrieved. They had left in such a hurry that he had neglected to procure any whiskey, an oversight he regretted.

"Maybe the sky would look lower if I had some whiskey to drink," he said. "But you were in such a hurry to leave that I forgot to pack any." Call was beginning to be exasperated. They were in deserted country and could get some rest, which would be the wise thing.

"You should clean your guns and stop worrying about the sky being too high," he said.

"I wish you talked more, Woodrow," Augustus said. "I get gloomy if I have to sit around with you all night. You don't talk enough to keep my mind off them gloomy topics." "What topics?" Call asked. "We're healthy and we've got no reason to be gloomy, that I can see." "You can't see much anyway," Gus said.

"Your eyesight's so poor you can't even tell that the sky's higher in Mexico." "The fact is, I was thinking about Billy," Augustus said. "We've never gone on a rangering trip without Billy before." "No, and it don't feel right, does it?" Call agreed.

"Now if he were here I'd have someone to help me complain, and you'd be a lot more comfortable," Augustus said.

They were silent for a while; both stared into the campfire.

"I feel he's around somewhere," Augustus said. "I feel Billy's haunting us. They say people who hang themselves don't ever rest. They don't die with their feet on the ground so their spirits float forever." "Now, that's silly," Call said, although he had heard the same speculation about hanged men.

"I can't stop thinking about him, Woodrow," Gus said. "I figure it was just a mistake Billy made, hanging himself. If he'd thought it over a few more minutes he might have stayed alive and gone on rangering with us." "He's gone, though, Gus--he's gone," Call reminded him, without reproach. He realized he had many of the feelings Augustus was trying to express. All through the bush country he had been nagged by a sense that something was missing, the troop incomplete. He knew it was Long Bill Coleman he missed, and Augustus missed him too. It was, in a way, as if Long Bill were following them at an uncomfortable distance; as if he were out somewhere, in the thin scrub, hoping to be taken back into life.

"I hate a thing like death," Augustus said.

"Well, everybody hates it, I expect," Call said.

"One reason I hate it is because it don't leave you no time to finish conversations," Gus said.

"Oh," Call said. "Was you having a conversation with Billy that night before ... it happened?" Augustus remembered well what he and Billy Coleman had been talking about the night before the suicide. Bill had heard from somebody that Matilda Jane Roberts, their old travelling companion, had opened a bordello in Denver. Matty, as they called her, had ever been a generous whore. Once, on the Rio Grande, bathing not far from camp, she had plucked a big snapping turtle out of the water and walked into camp carrying it by its tail. He and Long Bill always talked about the snapping turtle when Matilda's name came up.

"We was talking about Matty, I believe she's in Denver now," Gus said.

"I guess she never made it to California, then," Call said. "She was planning to go to California, when we knew her." "People don't always do what they intend, Woodrow," Gus said. "Billy Coleman had it in mind to turn carpenter, only he couldn't drive a nail." "He was only a fair shot," Call remembered. "I guess it's a wonder he survived as a ranger as long as he did." "You survive, and you're just a fair shot yourself," Augustus pointed out.

"He married," Call said. He remembered how anguished Long Bill had been after he learned that Pearl had been outraged by the Comanches. That discovery changed him more than all their scrapes and adventures on the prairies.

"He's out there now, Woodrow--I feel him," Gus said. "He's wanting to come back in the worst way." "He's in your memory, that's where he is," Call said. "He's in mine too." He did not believe Long Bill's ghost was out in the sage and the thin chaparral; it was in their memories that Long Bill was a haunt.

"Rangers oughtn't to marry," he said. "They have to leave their womenfolk for too long a spell.

Things like that raid can happen." Augustus didn't answer for a while.

"Things like that happen, married or not," he said finally. "You could be a barber and still get killed." "I just said what I believe," Call said.

"Rangering means ranging, like Captain Scull said. It ain't a settled life. I expect Bill would be alive, if he hadn't married." "I guess it's bad news for Maggie, if you feel that way, Woodrow," Gus said.

"She's needing to retire." "She can retire, if she wants to," Call said.

"Yes, retire and starve," Gus said.

"What would a retired whore do, in Austin, to earn a living? The only thing retired whores can do is what Matty just did, open a whorehouse, and I doubt Maggie's got the capital. I imagine she could borrow it if you went on her note." Call said nothing. He was being as polite as he could. They would need to be at their best, if they were to rescue Captain Scull.

They ought not to be quarrelling over things they couldn't change. He believed what he had just said: rangers ought not to marry. The business about going on Maggie's note was frivolous--Maggie Tilton had no desire to open a whorehouse.

"I doubt Captain Scull is even alive," Gus said. "That old bandit probably killed him long ago." "Maybe, but we still have to look," Call said.

"Yes, but what's our chances?" Gus asked.

"We'll be looking for one man's bones--they could be anywhere in Mexico." "We still have to look," Call said, wishing Augustus would just quiet down and go to sleep.

On the third day the rangers came into terrain that looked familiar--they had crossed the same country before, when Inish Scull had first pursued Ahumado into the Sierra Perdida.

"We've got to be alert now," Call said.

"We're in his country." In the afternoon they both had the feeling that they were being watched--and yet, as far as they could see, the country was entirely empty of human beings. The mountains were now a faint line, far to the west.

Augustus kept looking behind him, and Call did too, but neither of them saw anyone. Once Gus noticed a puff of dust, far behind them. They hid and waited, but no one came. Gus saw the puff of dust again.

"It's them," he said. "They're laying back." Too nervous to leave the problem uninvestigated, they crept back, only to see that the dust had been kicked up by a big mule deer. Gus wanted to shoot the deer, but Call advised against it.

"The sound of a gun would travel too far," he said.

"The sound of my belly rumbling will too, pretty soon, if we don't raise some more grub," Gus said.

"Throw your knife at him--I don't object to that," Call said. "I think it's time we started travelling at night." "Aw, Woodrow, I hate travelling at night in a foreign country," Augustus said.

"I get to thinking about Billy being a ghost. I'd see a spook behind every rock." "That's better than having Ahumado catch you," Call told him. "We're not as important as Captain Scull. They won't send no expeditions after us." "Woodrow, he ain't important either," Augustus said. "None of these ranchers let us have a single cow--I guess they figure the Captain's rich enough to pay his own way out." They rode all night and, the next day, hid under some overhanging rocks. Gus thought to amuse himself by playing solitaire, only to discover that his deck of cards was incomplete.

"No aces," he informed his companion. "That damn Lee Hitch stole every one of them. What good is a deck of cards that don't have no aces?" "You're just playing against yourself," Call pointed out. "Why do you need aces?" "You ain't a card-playing man and you wouldn't understand," Gus said. "I always knew Lee Hitch was a card cheat. I mean to give him a good licking once we get back to town." "I'd suggest hitting him with a post, if you want to whip him," Call said. "Lee Hitch is stout." As dusk approached they started to edge into the foothills and immediately began to see tracks. People had been on the move, some on horseback, some on foot, and all the tracks led out of the Sierra. Gus, who considered himself a tracker of high skill, jumped down to study the tracks but was frustrated by poor light.

"I could read these tracks if we'd got here a little earlier," he said.

"Let's keep going," Call said. "These tracks were probably just made by some poor people looking for a better place to settle." As they passed from the foothills into the first narrow canyon, the darkness deepened. Above them, soon, was a trough of stars, but their light didn't do much to illuminate the canyon. The terrain was so rocky that they dismounted and began to lead their horses. They had but one mount apiece and could not risk laming them. They entered an area where there were large boulders, some of them the size of small houses.

"There could be several pistoleros behind every one of those big rocks," Augustus pointed out.

"We might be surrounded and not know it." "I doubt it," Call said. "I don't think there's anybody here." When they had ridden into the Yellow Canyon before, there had been no army of pistoleros, just three or four riflemen, shooting from caves in the rock. Only their Apache scout had seen Ahumado lean out briefly and shoot Hector and the Captain. No one else saw him.

Ahumado was not like Buffalo Hump--he didn't prance around in front of his enemies, taunting them. He hid and shot; he was only seen by his enemies once he had made them his prisoner.

As they walked their horses deeper and deeper into the Sierra Perdida, Call became more and more convinced that they were alone. From years of rangering in dangerous territory he had gained some confidence: he believed he could sense the presence of hostiles before he saw them. There would be a sense of threat that could not be traced to any one element of the situation: the horses might be nervous, the birds might be more noisy; or the threat might be detectable by the absence of normal sounds. Even if there was nothing specific to point to, he would tense a little, grow nervous, and rarely was his sense of alarm without basis. If he felt there was about to be a fight, usually there would be a fight.

Now, in the canyon that led to the cliff of caves, he felt no special apprehension.

Few landscapes were more threatening, physically-- Gus was right about the boulders being a good place for pistoleros to hide--but he didn't believe there were any pistoleros. The place felt empty, and he said so.

"He's gone," he said. "We've come too late, or else we've come to the wrong place." "It's the place we came to before, Woodrow," Augustus said. "I remember that sharp peak to the south. This is the same place." "I know that," Call agreed, "but I don't think anybody's here." "Why would they leave?" Gus asked. "They'd be pretty hard to attack, in these rocks." Call didn't answer--he felt perplexed.

They were only a few miles from the place where they expected to find the Captain, but they had heard nothing and seen nothing to indicate that anyone was there.

"Maybe we came all this way for nothing," he said.

"Maybe," Gus said. "We've had a lot of practice, going on expeditions for nothing.

That's how it's mostly turned out. You ride awhile in one direction and then you turn around and ride back." In the rocky terrain they had several times heard rattlesnakes sing, so many that Augustus had become reluctant to put his foot on the ground.

"We'll just get snakebit if we keep tramping on in the dark like this," he said. "Let's stop, Woodrow." "We might as well," Call agreed. "We can't be more than a mile or two from the place where the camp was. In the morning we can ride in and see what we see." "I hope I see a whore and a jug of tequila," Gus said. "Two whores wouldn't hurt, either. I'm so randy I might wear one of them down." Now that he didn't have to march through rattlesnakes, Augustus felt a little more relaxed. He immediately took off his boots and shook them out.

"What was in your boots?" Call inquired.

"Just my feet, but I like to shake my boots out regular," Gus said.

"Why?" "Scorpions," Gus replied. "They crawl around everywhere, down here in Mexico. One could sneak off a rock and go right in my boot.

They say if a Mexican scorpion bites you on your foot it will rot all your toes off." They hobbled the horses and kept them close by. There was no question of a fire, but they had a few scraps of cold venison in their saddlebags and ate that.

"Why would he ask for a thousand cattle if he was planning to leave?" Call asked.

"Maybe he didn't," Gus suggested. "That vaquero who showed up in Austin might have been lying, hoping to get a thousand free cattle for himself. I expect he just wanted to start a ranch." "If so, he was a bold vaquero," Call said. "He came right into Austin. We could have hung him." "The more scared I get, the more I feel like poking a whore," Augustus said.

"How scared are you?" Call asked.

"Not very, but I could still use a poke," Augustus said.

When he thought about the matter he realized that he had almost no apprehension, even though they were close to the Black Vaquero's camp.

"I know why I ain't scared, Woodrow," he said. "Long Bill ain't haunting us no more.

He was following along for a while but he's not here now." "Well, he never liked Mexico," Call observed. "Maybe that's why." "Either that or he just decided it was too far to travel," Augustus said.

It was after the old crippled woman began to bring him food that Scull's mind slipped.

At first the food she brought him was only corn-- ears of young corn which she pitched down into the pit.

The kernels were only just forming on the corn, it was so young; but Scull ate it greedily, ripping off the husks and biting and sucking the young kernels for their milky juice. The cobs he threw in a pile. He had been so hungry he was about to eat the dead snakes; the corn and the cool water revived him; it was then, though, with his strength returning and his ankle not so sore, that he began to speak in Greek. He looked up at the old woman to thank her, to say "gracias," and instead reeled off a paragraph of Demosthenes that he had learned at the knee of his tutor, forty years ago. It was only later, in the night, when the pit was dark, that he realized what he had done.

At first his lapse amused him. It was a curious thing; he would have to discuss it with someone at Harvard, if he survived. He believed it was probably the eyelids. The sun, unobstructed, burned through forty years of memory and revealed, again, a boy sitting in a chilly room in Boston, a Greek grammar in his lap, while a tutor who looked not unlike Hickling Prescott put him through his verbs.

The next morning it happened again. He woke to the smell of tortillas cooking--then the old woman rolled up a handful and lowered them to him in the jug that she used to bring him water. Scull hopped up and began to quote Greek--one of Achilles' wild imprecations from the Iliad, he couldn't recall which book. The old woman did not seem startled or frightened by the strange ^ws coming from the filthy, almost naked man in the pit. She looked down at him calmly, as if it were a normal thing for a white man in a pit in the Mexican mountains to be spouting Greek hexameters.

The old woman didn't seem to care what language he spoke, English and Greek being equally unintelligible to her; but Scull cared.

It wasn't merely damage done by the sun that was causing him to slip suddenly into Greek; it was the Scull dementia, damage from the broken seed. His father, Evanswood Scull, intermittently mad but a brilliant linguist, used to stomp into the nursery, thundering out passages in Latin, Greek, Icelandic, and Old Law French, a language which it was said that he was the only man in America to have a thorough mastery of.

Now the aberration of the father had reappeared in the son, and at a most inconvenient time. In the night he suddenly woke up twitching in the brain and poured out long speeches from the Greek orators, speeches he had never been able to remember as a boy, an ineptness that caused him to be put back a form in the Boston Latin School. Yet those same speeches had been, all along, imprinted in his memory as if on a tablet--he had merely to look up at the old woman to ask for water to pour out, instead, a speech to the citizens of Athens on some issue of civic policy. He couldn't choke off these orations, either; his tongue and his lungs worked on, in defiance of his brain.

Scull began to try and curb himself; he needed to devise a way to get out of the pit before Ahumado came back, or, if not Ahumado, some other pistolero who would shoot him for sport. His tongue might soar with the great Greek syllables, but even that noble language wasn't going to raise him fifteen feet, to the pit's edge. He thought he might encourage the old woman to look around--maybe someone had left a length of rope somewhere. If she could find a rope and anchor it somehow, he felt sure he could pull himself up.

He was handicapped, though, by the insistent Scull malady. When he saw her old face above him he would try to make a polite request in Spanish, of which he knew a sufficiency, but before he could utter a single phrase in Spanish the Greek would come pouring out, a cascade, a flood, surging out of him like a well erupting, a torrent of Greek that he couldn't check or slow.

She'll think I'm a devil, he thought. I might yet get free if I could just choke off this Greek.

Xitla, for her part, leaned over the edge and listened to the white man as long as he wanted to talk. She could make no sense of the ^ws but the way he spoke reminded her of the way young men, heart-stricken by her beauty, had sung to her long ago. She thought the white man might be singing to her in a strange tongue he used for songs of love. He spoke with passion, his thin body quivering. He was almost naked; sometimes Xitla could see his member; she began to wonder if the white man was in love with her, as all men had been once. Since Ahumado had run over her with the horse and broken her back, few men had wanted to couple with her--a regret. Always Xitla had had men to couple with her; many of them, it was true, were not skilled at coupling, but at least they wanted her. But once the men knew that Ahumado hated her, they withdrew, even the drunken ones, for fear that he would tie them to the post and have Goyeto skin them. Xitla had not been ready to stop coupling when the men began to ignore her; she did not want to be like the other old women, who talked all day about the act that no one now wanted to do with them. Xitla had coupled happily with many men and thought she could still do so pleasurably if only she had a man with a strong member to be with.

The only possibility was the white man, but before any coupling could take place she would have to get the white man out of Ahumado's scorpion pit and feed him something better than the young green corn.

Xitla didn't know how she was going to do either thing until she remembered Lorenzo, a small caballero who was more skilled than anyone else at breaking horses. About a mile south of the cliff was a spot of bare, level ground, where Lorenzo took the young horses he worked with. There was a big post in the center of the clearing; often Lorenzo would leave the horses roped to the post for a day or two, so that they would have time to realize that he, not they, was in control. Lorenzo left a long rope tied to the snubbing post; perhaps it was still there. With such a rope she could help the white man get out of the pit.

It was a gamble, though. Xitla knew it would take her all day to hobble to the post and back.

There was an irritable old bear who lived somewhere down the canyon, and an old cougar too. If the old bear caught her he would probably eat her, which would put an end to her coupling, for sure.

Still, Xitla decided to try and secure the rope. With all the people gone the old bear might come into camp and eat her anyway. In the early morning she lowered the white man some tortillas and a jug of water and set out for the place where Lorenzo trained his horses.

By midday she regretted her decision. Her bent back pained her so badly that she could only hobble a few steps at a time. Xitla realized she could not go to the post and make it back to the camp by nightfall. The hunting animals would be out--the bear and the puma--if one of them smelled her they would kill her; the pumas in the great canyon were particularly bold. Several women had been attacked while waiting by the cliffso for their lovers to appear.

All day, Xitla crept on, stopping frequently to rest and ease her back. She did not want to be eaten by a puma or a bear. Long before she reached the spot where Lorenzo trained the horses the shadows had begun to fill the canyon.

When she got to the place Xitla saw at once that she had not travelled in vain: the rope that was used to restrain the young horses was still tied to the hitching post. It was a good long rope, as she had remembered. She could tie one end to the skinning post and throw the other end to the white man, so that he could pull himself up. Maybe he would continue to sing his strange love song to her; maybe his member would rise up with the song.

On the way back, though, hobbling slowly through the darkness with the coiled rope, Xitla felt a deep fear growing in her. At first she thought it was fear of the bear or the puma, but, as she crept along, pain from her back shooting down her leg, Xitla realized she had made a terrible mistake. She had allowed the white man's strange love song to drive judgment and reason out of her head; an old vanity and the memory of coupling had driven out her reason just as the shadows were driving the last light out of the canyon. Because she remembered a time when vaqueros would ride one hundred miles just to look on her beauty, she had forgotten that she was an old bent woman nearing the end of her time.

Now that Xitla was caught in the darkness, far from camp, she realized that she had been a fool.

What was it to couple with a man anyway? A little sweat, a jerk, a sigh. The pain shooting down her legs grew more intense. Now she had put herself at the mercy of Bear and Puma, that was bad; but now, as she crept along, a worse fear came, the fear of Ahumado. He was dying somewhere. Xitla knew he must have gone to the south, to their home, to seek the Tree of Medicines; but something was eating at his leg and he would not reach the tree. The pain in her leg came from Ahumado; perhaps Spider had bitten him, or Snake, or Scorpion. A poison was killing Ahumado; those who tasted the poison leaf died of poison when their time arrived. But Ahumado's time was Xitla's time too, and she would suffer it without even the protection of her little shelter at the camp. It was Ahumado who had made the prisoner show her his member and turn her head, Ahumado who had made the white man sing her love songs in the old tongue--perh the ^ws Scull used were in the language of the first human beings, ^ws which no one could resist. Because of it, she had been lured away, far from her little store of herbs and plants, things that might have helped her scare away Bear and Puma--all for a rope to save the white man, for a jerk and a sigh.

Ahumado had made it all happen, so that, as he was dying, a death more cruel than his own would come to Xitla.

She crawled faster, carrying the rope, although she knew well that such haste was foolish. Her fear grew so strong that she threw away the rope she had come so far to get. The rope was only another trick of Ahumado's; its loop was the loop of time that would close and catch her soon.

It was all a joke of Ahumado's, Xitla realized. He had put the white man in the pit to tempt her, to awaken her loins again, to draw her away from camp, where she had herbs and leaves to protect her. She had the black leaves that made a bad smell when burned--if she put them in the fire, then Puma would let her alone.

Puma did not like the smell the black leaves made when they were burned.

Xitla was only halfway back to camp when the night began to end. She had travelled slowly; often she had to stop and rest. Now the light of day was beginning to whiten the sky overhead; when the light sank into the canyon Xitla saw something near the canyon wall, not far ahead. At first she thought it was Puma. She yelled and yelled at it, hoping to scare it away. Puma would sometimes run from people who yelled.

It was not until the animal began to glide toward her that Xitla saw it wasn't Puma, it wasn't Bear: it was Jaguar. Around her neck she had a little red stone; the stone had hung around her neck all her life. The red stone was Parrot. Xitla clutched it in her hand as Jaguar came. Xitla knew that Jaguar would not stop for Parrot. Jaguar was coming to eat her.

But Ahumado too was dying--dying of poison somewhere to the south. He would not reach the Tree of Medicines. Xitla clutched the red stone tight and sent a message to Parrot. She wanted Parrot to find the body of Ahumado and peck out his eyes.

When Scull realized the old woman was no longer in the camp above him, he fell, for the first time, into raw panic, a kind of explosion of nerves that caused him to hop wildly around the floor of the pit, cursing and yelping out strange ^ws; he emitted cries and bursts of language as if he were farting fear out of his mouth.

He became afraid of himself; if he could have bitten himself to death at that time, he would have. He leapt on top of the mound of earth he had heaped over the three corpses and sprang at the wall of the pit several times, hoping to claw his way out of it by main force.

But it was hopeless. He could not leap out of the pit. When he exhausted himself he fell back, his eyes raw and stinging with the dirt that fell in them when he leapt at the walls of the pit.

Scull tried to calm himself but could not stifle his panic. He knew the old woman's absence might be only temporary; perhaps she had had to hobble a little farther than usual to gather the corn she brought him. Perhaps she had even journeyed to another village, to bring back someone who would help him out of the pit. He used all his force of mind to try and find a rational reason why the old woman's absence was temporary, but it was no use; the panic was violent and strong, so strong that he could not stop hopping around the pit, gibbering, mewling, cursing. There were many reasons why the old woman might only be gone temporarily, but Scull could not calm himself even for a second by thinking of them. He knew the old woman was dead, she would never be back, and he was alone, in a stinking pit in Mexico. His heart was beating against his ribs so hard he thought it might burst, and hoped it would; or that the arteries of his brain would pop and bring him a quicker death than starving, day by day, amid the scorpions and fleas --for fleas were one of the worst torments of the pit.

They were in his hair, his armpits, everywhere. If he sat still and focused he could see them hopping on his bare leg. From time to time, crazed, he tried to catch them and squeeze them to death, but they mostly eluded him.

With the old woman there Scull could manage a little hope, but now his nerves told him all was lost. The old woman was dead; he was stuck.

He knew he should resign himself, but for hours he was fired with panic, like a motor, a dynamo.

He jumped and jumped; it was as if lightning ran through him. He could not make himself stop jumping; he saw himself soaring with one miraculous jump all the way up, out of the pit. He jumped and gibbered all day, until dusk.

Then he collapsed. When the sunlight of a new day woke him, he was too drained to move.

He still had a little water, and a few scraps of food, but he didn't drink or eat, not for several hours; then, in a rush, he choked down all the food, drank all the water. Though he knew there would be no more he didn't care to ration what there was. He wanted to put sustenance behind him. He had, he thought, fought well; he had held out against torturous circumstances longer than many a man of his acquaintance would have, excepting only his second cousin Ariosto Scull. But the fight was over. He had seen many men--generals, captains, privates, bankers, widowers--arrive at the moment of surrender. Some came to it quickly, after only a short sharp agony; others held to their lives far longer than was seemly. But finally they gave up. He had seen it, on the battlefield, in hospital, in the cold toils of marriage or the great houses of commerce; finally men gave up. He thought he would never have to learn resignation, but that was hubris.

It was time to give up, to stop fighting, to wait for death to ease in.

Now he even regretted killing all the rattlesnakes. He should have left one or two alive. He could have provoked one or two to strike him; while not as rapid as the bite of the fer-de-lance that had killed his cousin Willy in a matter of seventeen minutes, three or four rattlesnake bites would probably be effective enough. Scull even went over and examined the dead snakes, thinking there might be a way to inject himself with the venom; it would ensure a speedier end. But he had beaten the snakes until their heads were crushed and their fangs broken; anyway, the venom must have long since dried up.

After his day of hopping and jumping, raging and gibbering, clawing at the walls and spewing fragments of old orations and Greek verse, Inish Scull settled himself as comfortably as he could against the wall of the pit and did nothing. He wished he had the will to stop his breath, but he didn't. Whether he wanted it or not, his breath came. It was a bright day; to look up at all with his lidless eyes was to invite the sun into his brain. Instead, he kept his head down. His hair was long enough to make a fair shade. He wanted to let go the habit of fighting, to die in calmness. He remembered again the Buddhist, sitting calmly in his orange robes by the Charles River. He had no orange robes, he was not a Buddhist, he was a Scull, Captain Inish Scull. He thought he had fought well in every war he had been able to find, but now was the day of surrender, the day when he had to snap the sword of his will, to cease all battling and be quiet, be calm; then, finally, would come the moment when his breath would stop.

Call and Gus were moving cautiously into the canyon of the Yellow Cliffso when a great bird rose suddenly from behind a little cluster of desert mesquite. Five more rose as well, great bald vultures, so close to the two men that their horses shied.

"I hope it wasn't the Captain they're eating," Augustus said. "It'd be a pity to come all this way and lose him to the buzzards." "It wasn't the Captain," Call said--through the thin bushes he glimpsed what was left of the body of an old woman. The vultures were reluctant to leave. Two lit on boulders nearby, while the shadows of the others flickered across the little clearing where the body lay.

"Must have been a cougar, to rip her up like that," Gus said. "Would a cougar do that?" "I guess one did," Call said. "See the tracks? He was a big one." They dismounted and inspected the area for a few minutes, while the vultures wheeled overhead.

"I've never seen a lion track that big," Augustus commented.

A rawhide rope lay not far from the corpse.

"Why would an old woman be way out here alone?" Gus wondered. "All she had was this rope. Where was she going?" "I guess we could pile some rocks on her," Call said. "I hate just to leave a body laying out." "Woodrow, she's mostly et anyway," Gus said. "Why spoil the buzzards' picnic?" "I know, but it's best to bury people," Call said. "I believe she was crippled--look at her hip." While they were heaping rocks on the corpse Call got an uneasy feeling. He couldn't say what prompted it.

"Something's here, I don't know what," he said, when they resumed their cautious ride into the canyon.

"It might be that cougar, hoping for another old woman," Gus said.

A few moments later, Augustus saw the jaguar. He was not as convinced as Call that Ahumado and his men had left, and was scanning the rocky ledges above them, looking for any sign of life. Probably if the old bandit had gone, he would have left a rear guard. He didn't want to be ambushed, as they had been the first time they entered the Yellow Canyon, and he took particular care to scan the higher ledges, where a rifleman could hide and get off an easy shot.

On one of the higher ledges he saw something that didn't register clearly with his eye. There was something there that was hard to see--he stopped his horse to take a longer look and when he did the jaguar stepped into full view.

"Woodrow, look up there," he said.

Call could not immediately see the jaguar, but then the animal moved and he saw him clearly.

"I think it's a jaguar," Augustus said.

"I never expected to see one." "I imagine that's what got the old woman," Call said.

For a moment, surprised, they were content to watch the jaguar, but their mounts were far from content. They put up their ears and snorted; they wanted to run but the rangers held them steady.

The jaguar stood on the rocky ledge, looking down at them.

"Do you think you can get off a shot?" Call asked. "If we don't kill it, it might get one of these horses, when it comes nightfall." Augustus began to lift his rifle out of the scabbard. Though both men were watching the jaguar, neither saw it leave. It was simply gone. By the time Augustus raised his rifle there was nothing to shoot.

"He's gone--it's bad news for the horses," Call said.

"I'll never forget seeing him," Augustus said. "He acted like he owned the world." "I expect he does--th world, at least," Call said. "I've never seen an animal just disappear like that." All afternoon, as they worked their way carefully through the narrow canyon, they often looked upward, hoping for another glimpse of the jaguar--but the jaguar was seen no more.

"Just because we don't see him don't mean he's not following us," Call said. "We have to keep the horses close tonight." Suddenly the canyon opened into the space they remembered from the time they were ambushed. The cliffso above them were pitted with holes and little caves. They stopped for a few minutes, examining the caves closely, looking for the glint of a rifle barrel or any sign of life.

But they saw nothing, only some eagles soaring across the face of the cliff.

"We ought to walk in, but we can't leave the horses," Call said. "That jaguar might be following us." "I think this camp is deserted," Augustus said. "I think we came too late." They rode slowly into the deserted camp, a sandy place, empty, windy. Only a ring of cold campfires and a few scraps of tenting were left to indicate that people in some numbers had once camped there.

Besides the tenting and the campfires there was one other thing that suggested the presence of humans: the skinning post, with a crossbar at the top, from which a badly decomposed, mangled, and half-eaten corpse still hung.

"Oh my Lord," Augustus said. He could barely stand to look at the corpse, and yet he couldn't look away.

"They say Ahumado had people skinned, if he didn't like them," Call said. "I supposed it was just talk, but I guess it was true." "I ain't piling no rocks on that," Gus said emphatically. The bloated thing hanging from the crossbar skinning post bore little resemblance now to anything human.

"I'll pass myself, this time," Call said.

He did not want to go near the stinking thing on the post.

In the pit, not far from where the two rangers stood, Inish Scull had slipped into a half sleep. Many times he had dreamed of rescue, so many that now, when he heard the voices of Call and McCrae, in his half sleep, he discounted the ^ws. They were just more dream voices; he would not let them tempt him into hope.

"We ought to search these caves," Call said.

"They might have had the Captain here. If we could find a scrap of his uniform or his belt or something at least it would be a thing we could take to his wife." "You look in the caves, Woodrow," Gus said. "I'll stand guard, in case that jaguar shows up." "All right," Call said.

As Call started for the largest of the caves at the base of the cliff, Augustus noticed the pit.

Because of the shadows stretching out from the pit it had been hard to see from where they entered the camp.

Curious, Augustus took a step or two closer--a stench hit him, but a stench less powerful than that which came from the swollen black flesh hanging from the skinning post. He stepped to the edge of the pit--f the stench it seemed to him that the pit might be a place where Ahumado tossed his dead. It could be that Captain Scull's body might be there; or what was left of it.