The Son

Chapter Forty-three. Eli McCullough, 1854–1855

That winter, instead of being sent down to the border, we were sent north to range the breaks from the Washita to the Concho. Winter was usually when the Indians holed up, but the previous year, the government had settled five hundred reluctant Comanches on the Clear Fork of the Brazos and another two thousand Caddos and Wacos on a larger reservation farther east.

As was normal, the reservations were short of food and the attempts to teach the Indians our superior white ways only convinced them of the opposite. The crops they grew were killed by drought or eaten by grasshoppers; there were more of them squeezed into a smaller space than they’d imagined humans could live. Locals complained about the reservation Indians stealing livestock; Indians complained the settlers were stealing horses and grazing their stock on Indian pastures. But we never caught any Indians, and the whites we caught we couldn’t do anything about.

MEANWHILE, THERE WERE houses going up within gunshot of the caprock. The settlers had pushed far beyond Belknap, Chadbourne, and Phantom Hill, a hundred miles past where the army could protect them. They did not care that there was only one Ranger company patrolling the entire eastern Llano. As for the legislature, lice-ridden clodhoppers did not vote or donate to political campaigns, so their problems, quietly viewed to be of their own causation — though necessary for the betterment of the state — were ignored. No new taxes. Rangers cost money.

One night in April we’d made camp on a mesa. Unlike the other ranging companies we were careful with our fires, building them like the Indians did, in arroyos or depressions away from any trees that would reflect their light. We could see thirty or forty miles, an expanse of badlands going on in every direction, the river snaking between mesas, buttes, and hoodoos, uncountable side canyons and rolling hills, motts of juniper and shinnery oak. The land was greening up, the hackberries and cottonwoods along all the streams, the grama and little bluestem on the river flats, and it was pleasant with the red rock buttes and green valleys and the darkening sky overhead. The Dipper was riding high and though we had not caught a single Indian in six months, the weather was warming and we were not going to lose any more toes. We were all ready to turn in when we saw a glow off in the east, in a small valley, that grew brighter the longer we watched it. Five minutes later the horses were saddled and we were making our way off the mesa, toward the fire.

The house was still burning when we reached it. There was a charred scalped body in the doorway; we could see it had been a woman. Off in the brush we found a man stuck with arrows. The arrows had two grooves and the moccasin prints narrowed at the front and I knew it was Comanches. The homestead had not been there long — the corral posts were still leaking sap — and there were the framed beginnings of a smokehouse and stable. Yoakum Nash found a silver locket and Rufus Choate found a barlow knife and after drinking our fill at their spring and making a quick scout for other valuables, we cut stick and rode after the Indians.

Their trail was clear enough, and a mile or so along it we came on a young boy with his head caved in, barely starting to stiffen. When we hit the river the tracks crossed and recrossed in every conceivable direction and the captain put me out front. All the trails were too obvious. I took us up the middle of the water until there was a long patch of rocky ground. I knew they’d taken it and sure enough, where the rocks ended, the pony tracks began.

The grass was high and the tracks were clear but there were not enough of them. They aimed toward a bluff, which the others presumed the Indians had climbed to watch their backtrail, but it was too early for that so I led us back to the river, losing another half hour. Then we found a pale blue dress in the rocks. It was something a teenager would wear, too small to have fit the burned woman, who was tall and chunky.

“Well, it appears we have a live one,” said the captain.

“Maybe,” said McClellan. He was the lieutenant. “Or maybe they just threw her off in the brush like the other one.”

I knew she was alive. They had taken her and her brother, but her brother was too young, or he had cried or been noisy and she was smart enough to take a lesson from that, despite what they had done to her before tying her to the horse.

We stood on the banks another minute, collecting our thoughts, looking around at the hoodoos and canyons and tall grass and cedar; the Indians might be anywhere. It would not take Napoleon to make an ambush in country like this and we all wanted to stay in the flat open plain along the water.

After a few more miles we came to a bend thickly overgrown with cottonwoods and there was something about the light. The sun was coming up behind us. The captain and I eased forward and he looked through his glass while I looked through mine; there were some specks along the red rock, maybe five miles out.

“You seeing horses?”

“Yup.”

“Do they know we’re following?”

“I don’t think so.”

The sun was rising into their eyes but we turned around and cut through the brush anyway, keeping the trees and buttes between us and the Indians, gaffing hell out of our ponies. But when we got another look at them again, this time from the top of a small mesa, they’d put even more distance on us.

MIDWAY THROUGH THE day our horses were blown. The Comanches would have changed mounts twice and the captain was reckless, leading us through funnels and thickets at top speed. “They don’t want a fight,” he said. “They just want to get away.”

Meanwhile we were getting close to the Llano and the badlands had narrowed to a single canyon a few miles wide. Blocks of stone the size of courthouses had tumbled from the upper walls; there were forests of petrified stumps and logs, herds of pronghorn watching from the ledges. The Indians would have to climb out.

We were getting close to the canyon mouth and as we emerged from some cottonwoods, there they were, only a half mile ahead but six hundred feet above us. One of them turned to look and waved his arm. I was squinting through my field glass. It was Escuté.

I couldn’t make out his face, but I could tell by his straight back and crooked arm and the way he’d done his hair, which was unlike most Comanches. I wondered if Nuukaru was with him. It occurred to me that Nuukaru might not even be alive.

Then a flat crack rolled across the valley.

One of our men had a Sharps rifle with a tang sight, but he must have missed the Indians by a comfortable margin because they continued to wave as they disappeared over the ledge.

After three hours of riding into box canyons and other dead ends, we found the trail the Indians had taken. There was bear grass and juniper hanging above us, water splashing over shelves of rock nearly too high for our horses to climb. A few men with bows, firing down into the chasm, could have easily gotten all of us, so we moved slow. Our arms were shaking from keeping the pistols up. The ravine ended in a cul-de-sac. There was a wall covered with drawings and carvings, snakes and men dancing and horses and buffalo, a shaman in a headdress, the swirling figures you see when you fall asleep.

It had the feeling of a sacred place and we expected the Indians to appear above us and rain arrows from every direction. Then there was a rustling or whirring all around us and Elmer Pease began shooting. The rest of us jumped behind the closest rock.

There were no arrows. Instead there was a kind of dervish hanging in the air, a small tornado, though there was no wind, it was some kind of Indian spirit, and it floated about for a long time before moving back down the canyon, where it vanished.

The captain came out from behind his rock. “McCullough and Pease, get up behind that face and see if the path goes anywhere.”

An hour later we were on the Llano. The Comanches’ trail was faint but clear. In the tracks I saw three riders split west from the group, driving a dozen unsaddled ponies, leaving a large, clearly beaten trail, a diversion. The main body had continued north in single file, their tracks nearly indistinguishable among all the buffalo sign and rocks. I thought about the girl they had taken. Then I thought about Escuté.

“Here they go,” I said. I pointed toward the diversion.

AFTER FIVE OR six miles it petered out. I guessed they had been dragging brush and dropped it. Or they began to ride single file. Or they knew tricks I had never learned. We turned and followed our backtrack; we were six hours behind them and they all had fresh mounts. I got off my horse and stood looking around in the dirt, ignoring the trail they had left across the rocks, invisible to everyone else, but clear enough to me, a faint disturbance, scuffs here and there in the dust.

“I’m about stumped,” I said.

The captain looked at me.

“We could split up and see what we find.”

“We aren’t splitting up,” the captain said.

“We know they didn’t go west and they probably didn’t go south, either.”

“You don’t see anything?” he said. “Anything at all?”

“There’s no tracks,” I told him.

He didn’t believe me but there was nothing he could do. We went north along the caprock, putting the spurs in and hoping to get a glimpse of them against the horizon before the sun faded. I watched as we rode, our track slowly diverging from Escuté’s until finally we were on a different course entirely.

THE CAPTAIN DIDN’T trust me after that, but it didn’t matter. Two months later, we made an unplanned resupply trip to Austin and he found his wife entertaining a sutler. The captain’s pistol misfired and the sutler stabbed him to death.

After the burial we went to the jail and took the sutler into custody. The sheriff handed us the keys.

“You ain’t gonna do nothin’?” the man said, as we marched him past the sheriff. “Just let them hang me, is that it?”

As we led him out into the sunlight, he protested that he’d been one of the filibusters to survive Mier, but we pointed out that was a long time ago, and in another country, and it was time to acknowledge the corn.

A few blocks from the capitol we stripped him, cut off everything hanging between his legs, then fixed him with a riata and dragged him up and down Congress. By the time we strung him up he had stopped kicking. I thought we ought to scalp him, but everyone else thought he made a fine blossom just as he was and there was no sense cuttin’ it too fat. We went to the tavern and I was elected captain over McClellan. I waited till they were good and damaged and then went back to scalp the sutler. I had always been fond of the captain.

WITH THE EXCEPTION of Nuukaru and Escuté, I had no doubts about my loyalties. Which were in the following order: to any other Ranger, and then to myself. Toshaway had been right: you had to love others more than you loved your own body, otherwise you would be destroyed, whether from the inside or out, it didn’t matter. You could butcher and pillage but as long as you did it for people you loved, it never mattered. You did not see any Comanches with the long stare — there was nothing they did that was not to protect their friends, their families, or their band. The war sickness was a disease of the white man, who fought in armies far from his home, for men he didn’t know, and there is a myth about the West, that it was founded and ruled by loners, while the truth is just the opposite; the loner is a mental weakling, and was seen as such, and treated with suspicion. You did not live long without someone watching your back and there were very few people, white or Indian, who did not see a stranger in the night and invite him to join the campfire.

People came and went in the Rangers. I was not always elected captain, but I always had a slot to ride. I looked after the new arrivals, whether they were younger or older, and I was beginning to see my life laid out in front of me, one year no different from the next; the faces around me would change, I would put them into the ground or give them a clap on the back as they mustered out, then I would go and see to my equipment, drop my revolvers off at the gunsmith, my tack at the saddlemaker, buy a new shirt and pants, then trade my land vouchers for a horse or whiskey or something useful.

Then I shaved off my six-month beard, figured out what company was riding out next, and put my name back on the list.