Comanche Rose (3 page)

Hap Walker was afraid he wasn't going to make it. The temperature had dropped steadily since early morning, and the bitter, howling wind whipped his raw face. Shivering, he turned up the collar of his buffalo hide coat and leaned forward, hunching his shoulders over the saddle horn. By the looks of the heavy gray sky, a big norther was blowing down from Kansas, and when the full brunt of it hit, God deliver anybody fool enough to get caught out in the open.

But that wasn't the worst of it. He was sick. After three days in the saddle, the pain in his leg was white-hot, throbbing with his pulse, and he was so damned lightheaded he was sick to his stomach. He felt worse now than when the Comanchero bullet had shattered his thigh last summer.

He was a stubborn fool, he admitted it. When he'd heard the government was offering an emergency price of five and a half cents per pound for beef on the hoof, he should have sent Diego Vergara to make the deal, but he'd had too much pride for that. Instead, he'd convinced Amanda he could do the job better than Vergara because he knew Black Jack Davidson, the commanding officer at Fort Sill, personally. In truth, he didn't have much use for the old martinet.

What he'd really wanted was to prove to himself as much as to her that he wasn't useless, that his life hadn't ended when the bum leg had forced him out of the Texas Rangers. After spending nearly half of his thirty-seven years fighting Indians and outlaws, he'd found retirement a bitter pill to swallow. He felt like an old warhorse put out to pasture before its time. After years of thinking he might like to farm or ranch, he'd discovered it was really rangering in his blood, after all. He knew now he wasn't cut out for anything else.

He forced his thoughts to Clay, knowing he was going to be as mad as fire when he got home and found Hap gone. But Amanda had a knack for handling him, something Hap had never expected. Yeah, the wild, blue-eyed young'un he'd found fourteen years ago in that Comanche camp was taming down, married to the Ybarra heiress and studying law now.

It was real funny how things turned out, he reflected. He'd never guessed when he stood between that kid and Barton, shouting, "Don't shoot! This one's white!" that the boy'd turn out to be like a younger brother to him. He remembered that day like yesterday.

"Outta my way, Hap!" the lieutenant ordered.

"He's white, I'm telling you!"

"He's a damned savage!" Barton raised his rifle, drawing a bead on the boy. "For the last time, outta my way!"

Before the older man could fire, Hap pushed the struggling kid behind him, trying to hold him there. "Then you better kill me with him. Otherwise, I'm reporting it," he declared. "And I'll say it was cold-blooded murder."

"They've had him too long, Hap," Barton argued.

"Maybe, maybe not. All I knows he's white," Hap maintained stubbornly. "You're gonna have to plug me first, Bill."

And all the while he'd been trying to shield the kid, the little devil had been kicking his legs, trying to bring him down. But in the end it was Barton who wavered, lowering the gun, growling, "If he scalps anybody, I'm hanging you for it."

The kid had given Hap one hell of a time, fighting him every inch of the way back to the ranger camp at San Saba. Hap's shoulder still bore the scar where the boy'd jumped him, then stabbed him with his own knife. He'd finally trussed the kid up like a wild animal and tied him over the side of a pack mule. The young'un raved in Comanche for two solid days before he finally lost his voice.

And it wasn't over when they got in, either. While he was trying to locate some relations to take the boy, the kid must've escaped seven or eight times, determined to get back to what was left of his Comanche family. His Indian name was Nahahkoah, or Stands Alone, but after the second time he ran away, the rangers jokingly referred to him as "Long Gone," and it stuck until they discovered he was really Clayton McAlester, the lone survivor of a Comanche raid nine years before.

It took some doing, but Hap found a maiden aunt in Chicago willing to take him. Grateful to see the kid go, the whole ranger company chipped in to make the train fare. The way Frank Kennedy put it, it was worth the money to be able to sleep with both his eyes closed again. They'd all gone down to the depot to watch Clay off, then got roaring drunk to celebrate afterward.

Miss Jane McAlester the aunt's name was, Hap remembered. Lord, but what he would've given to be there when Clay stepped off that railroad car. When Hap wrote her, there hadn't been any good way to explain that the kid tore into his food with his bare hands, slept naked on the bare floor under his bed, and spoke Comanche a damned sight better than English. But that spinster woman must've been made of pretty stern stuff, for she kept her wild nephew four years, somehow managing to get him about half-civilized.

After that he'd come back to Hap, and they'd enlisted in the Confederate Army and fought together in Hood's tough Texas Brigade. Then Clay'd followed Hap into the Texas State Police, and finally into the Texas Rangers when the state legislature reactivated them. He'd made a damned good ranger—he'd go after the toughest, meanest cusses ever born, and get 'em every time. About the only thing he wouldn't do was turn on the Comanches that raised him. Hap, on the other hand, went after them with a vengeance.

Now the irony of the situation wasn't lost on him. While Clay was reading law in Austin, it was Hap who was riding north to sell beef to feed Clay's Indians. And he did so with real misgivings. Ybarra beef might see the savages through the winter, keeping them alive so they could raid Texas after the spring thaw. But it was the government peace policy, not his, and the Indian Bureau had hired a bunch of damned Quakers to implement it.

The soft-headed Quakers thought they could love Comanches into submission, but they actually made things worse by turning a blind eye when so-called peaceful agency Indians took to the war trail. If they'd take away every horse and every gun before they issued any food or clothes, they could put a stop to a lot of it, but they didn't. Instead, afraid of offending their red-skinned pets, they'd declined the army guard sent from Fort Sill, a few miles away.

He sucked in his breath, trying to stay awake, and noticed suddenly there was something more than sleet in the air. Smoke. He was still some distance from the agency, he knew that much. Reining in, he leaned over his pommel, squinting his eyes, trying to make out the trail ahead of him. And what he saw made his blood run cold.

Fifteen, maybe twenty tipis right in his path. If they saw him, they'd probably come after him, and he was in no shape to make a run for it. They'd be sure to recognize him, then all hell'd break loose. Yeah, they'd have a real party with him, and they'd make it last awhile.

They even had a name for him, he knew that, too. Too Many Bullets, a tribute to the sixteen-shot Henry rifle he'd carried ever since the war. He'd probably killed fifty or sixty Comanches with it. Yeah, the squaws would be sharpening their knives, all right.

He didn't dare run. He'd just have to go in real peaceful-like and brazen it out. Clay always said it was a rule among Comanches that they had to welcome anybody, even a worst enemy, if he came in peace. Hap didn't much like the notion, but he was about to put that rule to a real test.

"Well, Red," he murmured, nudging the big roan horse with his left knee, "I reckon we're going in real quiet-like." Straightening his shoulders, he rested his hand on the saddle sheath holding the Henry, then eased the animal into a slow, deliberate walk. Now if he could only keep the damned Indians from knowing how sick he was, maybe he'd have a chance of getting to the agency.

Bull Calf was huddled morosely over his fire, trying to ignore the fretful whimpering of Little Coyote, his two-year-old son, and the reproachful looks cast his way by Little Hand, the child's mother. Across from him, Sun in the Morning, his younger wife, boiled dead grass and mesquite bark in water. Goaded, he rose and reached for his rifle. Despite the bitter cold he was going to have to find something to feed them, even if he had to steal a cow from the agency. If the soldiers came for him, it'd at least be for something he'd done.

While Bull Calf was still loading the gun, a boy burst into his tipi, exclaiming breathlessly,
"
Tejano
!"

Rifle in hand, the Comanche chief stepped outside to watch the lone rider coming through the swirling snow. The white man wore a battered leather hat pulled low, a heavy hide coat, buckskin pants, and scarred brown boots. As the gap closed between them, the war chief's jaw tensed with recognition.

Tondehwahkah.
He'd faced the
Tejano
and five other men from ambush once, and it had been enough to make Bull Calf remember him forever. When the brief battle ended, every ranger was still alive, but nine Comanches lay dead, and four more had been wounded so badly that Bull Calf had abandoned the war trail and retreated to the safety of the Llano.

Despite the defeat, Bull Calf had lost no face, for Tondehwahkah's deadly aim was so well-known across the Comancheria that Coyote Droppings, medicine man of the Quahadis, made medicine bags against the ranger's power. But they hadn't worked, and after a number of braves had died wearing them, nobody believed in them anymore. Tondehwahkah's medicine had proven greater than that of his enemies.

Behind Bull Calf, Fat Elk emerged from his lodge, waving his gun defiantly. Grabbing the man's arm, the chief forced it down, telling him tersely he couldn't kill the ranger on the reservation without bringing the soldiers. Disappointed, the other Indian muttered that Bull Calf was turning into an old woman unfit to lead warriors. But even as he said it, others shouted him down.

"He lets us starve like helpless children," Fat Elk retorted angrily. "For the good of the people, he should have killed the woman where he found her; instead, he has brought a bad spirit to live among us, working its evil. Can any doubt it? Before Woman Who Walks Far came, there were many buffalo, and a Penetaka did not go hungry—now they are few, and we are starving! Where are the deer? The antelope? Even the rabbits? They have fled because of this woman! The spirit that possesses her must leave or we will die!"

"You could have killed her yourself, but your medicine was not strong enough," Bull Calf reminded him. "You were afraid of her." Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, he mused aloud, "But now Many Bullets will take her back to her people, and Haworth will give us food."

"A brave man does not wait to be handed what he can take," the disgruntled Indian scoffed to the others. "Look at Bull Calf. Once he was powerful, but now he is weak. Once he led us down the war trail, but no more. Now he cannot even lead a buffalo hunt. No, he leads us to beg in our own land!"

As his words brought a murmur of assent from some of them, the rider entered the camp. Fat Elk's gaze traveled from the big roan to the man in the saddle, and his bluster left him. He was facing Tondehwahkah, and the white man had his hand on the gun with many bullets. He retreated as Bull Calf stepped forward.

Hap's eyes took in the line of suddenly silent, grim-faced Comanches, wondering what the hell he'd gotten himself into. Suddenly, a little boy in a tattered breech-clout and worn leggings, his ribs sticking out above a bloated belly, spat out,
"Tejano!" A
woman quickly thrust the child behind her, whispering, "Tondehwahkah," as though he'd come straight from hell. Yeah, they knew who he was, all right, and they weren't exactly glad to see him.

He was too weak to whip an ant, but he knew he couldn't show it. He had to act like he'd intended to be there. Seeing the big, ugly buck in front of him, he raised his left hand in greeting.

"Howdy. Name's Walker—Hap Walker."

The Indian thumped his chest proudly. "Me Bull Calf— heap big chief." Speaking in pidgen English and signing at the same time, he immediately launched into what sounded like a bitter complaint, punctuating it by hitting his palm with his fist. "People come, make peace. No food, no smoke, no—" He paused, groping for a word, then finished with, "No nothing!" His voice rose angrily, threatening, "For Bull Calf, no food, no peace!"

"Whoa, now, you've got the wrong fella," Hap protested, unable to follow the grievance. "Tell it to Haworth."

"Haworth!" the Indian snorted. "He say no food! You look," he demanded, pointing at another underfed child. "People come, make peace—no get food." The chief's hands moved, signing rapidly, then he insisted, "No got captive, only woman—she no captive." When Hap didn't respond, the chief's frustration erupted. "You tell him give food! Only got this many white woman!" he insisted forcefully, holding up one finger. "No more!"

As light-headed as he was, Hap managed to guess that the Quaker agent was demanding the release of captives before he doled out rations. "You better take her in," he advised.

"No take," Bull Calf declared adamantly.

"You don't want the blue shirts to come, do you?"

The chief shook his head. "No lock Bull Calf up like Satanta! You take—give Haworth. Tell 'um give food!"

Now it was beginning to make sense. Ever since Haworth's predecessor had allowed Colonel Grierson to arrest Satanta, both Kiowas and Comanches were suspicious of the soldiers at Fort Sill. Bull Calf was wanting to avoid any confrontation by sending his captive in with Hap. And he was in no condition to take her. He wasn't even sure he could make it that far himself. It was taking all he had to keep from passing out then and there.

"Yeah, well, I don't—"

But the chief had already turned away, barking out something to a skinny squaw, who ducked behind the tipi. Returning his attention to Hap, he threw up his hands in disgust. "Woman no good to Bull Calf—bad spirit. You take. Bull Calf no want her," he insisted.

Hap had to get out of there. He was shaking from a fever as much as from the cold. He nudged Old Red with his knee, but before the horse could move, the Indian had grabbed his bridle, stopping him. "No go," he declared forcefully.