The Texans (27 page)

Chapter 33

R
ed Wing heard the gunfire and war cries growing nearer in the distance, but from where she was at the far side of the camp she couldn't see the battle she knew was taking place. Little Bull's son had led in five horses for them, but he was just a small boy, and the sounds of fighting and the frantic goings-on of the camp had the animals nervous and flighty. He led them by neck ropes, and a big blue roan set back on the rope and jerked the boy to the ground. He tried to hang on and keep them from wheeling away, but the rawhide ropes bit into his hands and the horses drug his light body along the ground as if he were no more than a feather. The roan and two others got away from him and stampeded off at a run with their heads held high and wide to avoid stepping on their trailing lead ropes. The two horses he managed to keep hold of and his own mount weren't enough to both pack the household and to carry them all away.

Buffalo Butt immediately accepted the fact that she was going to have to leave behind her home and most of the items that she cherished. She hastily began packing a single, small bundle of necessaries that she could carry with her.

Meanwhile, Speckled Tail was torn between her treasures and the fear of still being in camp if the Tejanos should win a victory. In the end, her treasures won out, and she attempted to roll all her personal belongings, as well as Red Wing's valise, into a buffalo robe.

“You're going to get us all killed if the Tejanos come,” Buffalo Butt shouted at the Kiowa. “Our husband told us to be gone quickly.”

Speckled Tail ignored the scolding and kept gathering things she couldn't bear to part with. Every time she told herself she was through, she would spy something else that she had to have.

Red Wing stood back and watched it all. While the two squaws argued, she decided to take another look at the gray buffalo runner staked out just beyond the women. She turned to find the boy staring at her. He was obviously worried about the fight and his failure to hold on to the horses, but he made a valiant effort to mask his concern. She remembered another boy who had been much like that at his age—always fierce on the outside and worried on the inside. Looking at the boy was like going back ten years and seeing her brother again as a teenager.

He seemed not to notice that she was studying the buffalo runner and soon lost interest in her and frowned impatiently at his mother and Speckled Tail. “Hurry up. My father trusted me to see you away from here.”

Secretly, Pony Heart was torn between the fear he felt among the women of the camp and the need to watch his father and the rest of the warriors fight the Tejanos. He had gone to see the prisoners tortured less out of a desire to see enemies suffer than to lay his eyes on the devils he had heard so much about. Nothing he had seen about the three white men had explained all that he had heard of them, or the concern of his people at the arrival of a small war party of their kind.

Red Wing noticed that the boy was lost in his own thoughts, and she decided that it was then or never if she was going to escape. She ran for the buffalo runner and thought she had passed the arguing squaws without them even knowing it. The boy was slow to react, and she had hold of the horse's stake rope before his mouth could even form a warning.

She tugged the anchor loose from the ground and worked her way up the long rope to the shying horse. Hiking her doeskin dress up her thighs a little, she took hold of the gray's mane at the withers and swung her right leg up over his back. He instantly made two stiff-legged jumps and promptly bucked her off. Before she could get back up and try again, Buffalo Butt jerked the rope from her hands. She stood glaring over Red Wing while the sound of warriors calling out warnings to the camp, and the gunfire of the Texans grew closer.

Red Wing wanted to cry with frustration. She had blown an easy chance by her own stupidity. She had been so long among the white men that she had grown used to mounting on the left side of her horses. Comanches, and most other Indians, used the off side, and many of their wilder horses never learned to tolerate anything different. The gray was obviously no kid horse, and she had startled him by mounting on the wrong side.

She avoided Buffalo Butt's hot gaze and got to her feet. She was dusting herself off when Little Bull rode up mounted behind another warrior. His left arm was bound in a crude sling, and his face was riddled with pain. He leapt off and strode directly for her while the other warrior turned and went back through the camp at a run.

“The Tejanos have beaten us,” Little Bull said. It was plain his anguish wasn't all because of his broken arm.

“Here is your horse.” Pony Heart offered the buffalo runner's rope to him.

Little Bull went to one of the other two horses and brought it back to Red Wing. “Get on.”

She stood stoically and tried to bluff him. “I will not.”

He slipped the war club from his belt and brandished it at her. His eyes were crazy with pain. “You'll ride, or I'll tie you belly down on this horse.”

“Forget me, brother, and let me be dead again,” she said. “Save your family.”

“I would kill you myself before I would see you lost to the Tejanos again.” He sounded as if he had truly gone mad.

Sweat was dripping off his face, and she saw that both his mind and his body had been pushed to the brink. Delay was her only chance, but she knew he meant what he said. Even injured as he was, there was no way she could fight off the four of them.

She didn't move quickly but got on the horse as he had ordered her. He took his knife and cut a section of the gray's stake rope. He made a one-handed noose and slipped it over her foot and tied her two ankles together under the horse's belly. With an agility that was shocking given his condition, he swung on the gray's back with her lead rope in his hand.

“Come, woman. There's little time,” he said to Buffalo Butt.

“Go on. I'll be right along.” Buffalo Butt held the last remaining horse at ready, but her eyes went back to where Speckled Tail had disappeared into one of the tepees.

“Speckled Tail!” Little Bull shouted.

The Kiowa finally appeared with her mirror and her comb clutched against her chest. She tucked the items into her buffalo robe and struggled to get the large roll of the hide draped over the horse's back. Buffalo Butt knocked the robe from her hands, and Speckled Tail cried out and went to her knees to dig her mirror and comb back out of the crude pack.

“Get up behind me, and leave that fool!” Little Bull was looking across the village, and he sounded as if the Texans were already upon them.

Red Wing realized that the fight had moved into the camp itself, and her heart pounded with hope. The mix of terror and stubborn courage she felt was the same as the last time she had stood in such a camp just before the Texans had appeared with their guns belching hell's smoke and their big-brimmed hats shading eyes wilder than any Comanche. Only this time, she wanted the Texans to take her away.

Buffalo Butt slapped Little Bull's horse across the rump with the palm of her hand and sent him off in a jump. Red Wing's horse followed by its lead rope and the boy raced alongside them. They turned into the dry streambed and Red Wing looked back to see Buffalo Butt trying to calm her frightened horse into letting her and Speckled Tail mount.

The streambed ran due west of the camp and gradually shallowed until it no longer provided cover for them. Little Bull turned out of it and pointed them westward toward the dust trail of those that had already fled the camp.

Red Wing kept looking back at the camp and saw the Texans overrun Little Bull's lodges and Buffalo Butt shoot one of them before she died. Red Wing started to call out when she recognized the Prussian, but then spotted the tall man sitting his horse a little ways from the others. It was her Odie, and she lifted a hand to him.

Chapter 34

T
he Texans started back through the lodges on foot like pirates swarming over the side of a ship, and the fighting in the village swiftly turned into more of a wild brawl than a pitched battle. The Comanche warriors continued to linger, but the fight they put up was only a last, wrathful effort to protest the enemy plundering their camp. Odell and the Prussian had spotted Red Wing at the same time, and both of them spurred out of the mayhem in pursuit. Neither one of them said anything to each other, as they raced side by side across the prairie.

Crow was already tired from the battle, but when Odell asked him for speed he didn't refuse. He ran like his lungs were made of cast iron and his heart as big as Texas. There were few horses to match his like, but the Prussian's Kentucky horse ran neck and neck with him just the same. Red Wing's captors had what should have been an insurmountable lead, but there hadn't been enough time for Little Bull's gray buffalo runner to totally heal from his abscess. There was an ever-so-slight falter to his stride every time the sole of that hoof struck the ground. That was just enough of a handicap to make it a race.

Over the course of a mile, they had closed to within a hundred yards of the two Comanches and Red Wing. They were close enough for Odell to recognize the warrior he had fought with earlier, and the wild and pleading looks Red Wing threw back at him brought on a rage like none he had felt before. He banged his heels unmercifully into Crow's belly. The Comanche warrior leading Red Wing was heading for the dust trail on the horizon some four miles ahead. Odell knew that it wasn't just a race to run the brave down, but to do it before he and the boy reached the aid of the other refugees fleeing the camp.

Odell felt how hard Crow was straining underneath him, and although the horse still seemed willing, he knew he was running him into the ground. He looked to the Prussian and saw that the Kentucky horse was lathered and roaring from the back of his throat with every breath. The Prussian whipped the horse with the long tail of his harness leather reins, but it was plain that his thoroughbred was almost running dead.

When they cut the distance in half over another long stretch of ground, the Prussian leveled his carbine on the warrior's back. It was plain that he knew his horse had nothing left to close with, and he was going to take a chance. Odell started to shout at him not to risk hitting Red Wing, but the Kentucky horse's front legs buckled and it broke to a staggering trot and almost fell. By the time the Prussian regained his seat the Comanche leading Red Wing was already too far away to chance a shot with the smoothbore carbine.

Odell left the Prussian sitting his wind-broke horse and continued the chase. He saw that Red Wing was leaning out over her horse's neck and trying to slip its rope hackamore over its ears. Crow had brought him to within twenty yards of the Comanche in front of her, and Odell drew one pistol. A deep but narrow wash cut across their way from the foot of a low hill, and the Comanche hit it at a run. All three riders disappeared over the bank before Odell even recognized what was coming. Crow was running blind and didn't even feel the check of the bit when Odell tried to slow him. They sailed off the six-foot drop and hit in a cloud of silty sand.

The Comanche's gray had fallen on impact, throwing him. Crow came over the lip of the bank at the same time and almost trampled the fallen warrior. Odell twisted in the saddle to fire a shot into the Comanche as he passed, but Crow reached the far bank and stalled halfway up it. He reared high and fell over backward, and Odell was hard-pressed to avoid being smashed by his saddle horn. He pushed himself away from the saddle just before the horse's crushing weight thumped into the ground.

He made it to one knee just as Red Wing rode past him down the wash. He heard her pull up behind him, but he didn't take the time to look her way. The boy had cleared the wash, and there was nothing left between Odell and the warrior except sixty feet of open ground.

The Comanche managed to rise to his knees, and his eyes locked onto Odell. He snarled like the wolf he was and tugged at the long-handled war club at his belt with his good arm. Odell dug his feet into the sand, drew his other pistol, and lunged forward with a gun in each hand. He cocked and fired, cocked and fired, alternating his shots from one hand to the other at a dead run. The crack of the pistols roared in his ears as he charged forward, and he was blind to the rest of the world. He saw only the Comanche's body jerking with the impact of his bullets. Five times he shot, and his pistol barrel was almost touching that hateful, black-painted face when he squeezed off the fifth. He staggered over the fallen Comanche and fell hard.

The Comanche lay lifeless and shot to doll rags when Odell got back to his feet. He stood over the body with his breath coming in ragged gasps and the pistols in his big fists trembling with fury. He stared long into his enemy's face until all the hate and hurt slowly ebbed from him and was carried away on the wind. The violent satisfaction he had felt moments before was gone, and he only felt hollow and spent.

His mind finally registered the sound of hooves behind him, and he turned to see Red Wing ride up beside him. Of all the ways he had imagined meeting her again, he was in no way prepared for the look on her face as she stared past him at the Comanche lying on the ground. Her tears weren't those of joy at being rescued, and he realized that she wept for the warrior dead at his own hands. He wanted to speak to her, but something heavy and silent settled between them that he had no words to breach.

“Would you bury him?” she finally asked.

He wanted to hug away the pain and the hurt of her and wipe away her tears, but couldn't fathom what cruel trick he suspected fate had wrought. “Who was he?”

“Comanches do not speak the names of the dead, but once he was my brother.”

“I didn't know.” Odell was at a loss as to how the world could have tilted so.

“No, you couldn't have.” There was no accusation in her voice, but she looked at him as if she could see right into his soul.

“He was one of those that killed Pappy and your father.” Odell cut the rope that bound her feet.

“I know, but it doesn't make it any easier.”

The Comanche boy appeared on the bank above them with his bow in his hand and an arrow nocked. Odell lifted one pistol, but Red Wing rode her horse in front of him. She said something in Comanche and the boy shouted something back. Odell stepped around her horse just in time to see the boy shake his little bow at him and whirl his horse away. He listened to the sound of hoofbeats until they faded in the distance.

“What'd you tell him?” Odell asked.

Red Wing was still looking in the direction the boy had fled, even though she could see nothing of the plains around them from the bottom of the wash. “I told him to ride on to his people, and that his father's body would be here should he return one day.”

“What did he say?” It dawned on Odell that not only had he killed her brother, but he had perhaps orphaned her nephew in the process.

She looked at him sadly. “He said that one day he'll be a man, and he will kill you. He swore that his wrath will never die, and the Tejanos will know this is true and never know a day's peace so long as he lives.”

“Will he be all right until he finds the rest of his tribe?”

“He'll find his way. He is Comanche.”

Odell knew nothing to say to her that would make it better. Killing the Comanche had felt like justice, but it was also breaking her heart. He dragged her brother's body to an undercut in the sandy bank, and left it lying there while he climbed up out of the wash. He waited for Red Wing to say something, or to instruct him in some burial ceremony, but she just sat her horse and stared at him. He stomped on the lip of the bank until it began to give way, working his way backward until he had caved in enough of it to cover the body well with the little avalanche he created.

He left her alone with her thoughts at the grave and went to where Crow lay on his side at the bottom of the wash. He knelt in front of the horse and laid a hand on his neck. Crow seemed unaware that Odell was even there and groaned and made a halfhearted attempt to rise. The horse only managed to slightly lift its head, and his lungs rattled with every slow rise and fall of his side. Odell saw the blood in Crow's nostrils and the broken bone showing through the torn hide of the right knee.

“Lord Almighty,” he whispered.

He thought of all the long miles they had come together and all the one-sided conversations the horse had endured. He remembered how when turned loose hobbled, Crow would sometimes come to the campfire at night to stand by him, as if the black horse too needed the company.

He laid his pistol against Crow's forehead and ran his hands along the horse's neck. He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger, and felt Crow shudder and grow still beneath his hand. Red Wing rode up and waited quietly.

“He never let me down, not once,” Odell said.

“I knew he wouldn't.”

“I know you loved him just like I did, and I almost wish you'd never given him to me.”

She smiled for the first time, although it was small and faded from her mouth as quickly as it had formed. “He was the only thing I could think of that might bring you back to me.”

He thought her more beautiful than he remembered. “I wish . . .”

She cut him off with a lifted hand. “Don't say anything. Just take me home.”

He stripped the saddle from Crow and put it on her horse after cutting loose her bound ankles so she could dismount. The animal wasn't used to the rigging or Odell's bit, but was too tired to put up much of a fight. While Odell tightened his cinch, he studied the Comanche's gray gelding standing ground-tied just down the wash. He was a magnificent looking horse, but seemed to be favoring one leg.

“He has a bad hoof that's not quite healed, but when healthy I think he might have even outrun Crow,” Red Wing said.

“I don't know what I'd do with a crippled Comanche horse,” Odell said lamely, although he had to admit that he was going to need a horse.

“Why, you'd ride him,” Red Wing said. “And if you didn't like him you could sell him to someone in the settlements for a good price.”

“Well, it might take a while to heal him up, but I never thought of selling him.”

“Mama says that most men never even think a day ahead,” Red Wing said.

Odell eased up and caught the rein trailing from the gray's rope war bridle. The horse didn't seem too lame, and when Odell picked up his front right hoof he could see where somebody had whittled a hole to drain an abscess. The infection seemed to be gone, but the hole was deep enough that it acted much like a stone bruise. A leather pad nailed between the hoof and a shoe might cushion him enough for easy travel until he could heal. The more he looked at the horse, the more he decided he would have been a fool to leave him behind. But then again, Red Wing's ideas usually made sense.

He looked out over the lip of the wash and saw more Comanches coming across the plains. The sound of the Texans' gunfire had ceased, and it was a large group of warriors retreating from the camp. He helped Red Wing into the saddle and led the two horses to where the wash was the deepest. He parked them as close to the high bank as he could and waited. He listened for the sound of hoofbeats while he looked up at Red Wing on her horse.

“You run if I tell you to,” he said.

She seemed to be paying no attention to the coming Comanches or his instructions. She was looking at him in a way he couldn't get a handle on, and he thought the silence between them was worse than not knowing what she was thinking.

“I don't know how I could have made things any different,” he said.

“Odie, I wish there was someone to blame for all of this, but it isn't you,” she said.

The Comanches veered south to avoid crossing the wash, but still came so close that Odell could see their dust. He climbed up in front of Red Wing and started back to the Comanche camp with the gray horse led behind. They hadn't ridden far when Odell felt her arms go around his waist and her cheek settle against his back. His heart felt too big for his chest, and the feel of her against him was more right than anything in long, long time.

They rode up on the Prussian leading his Kentucky horse a half mile outside the Comanche camp. He watched them come with a hand shading his eyes.

“Hello, Frau Red Wing,” the Prussian said. “I thought we had lost you for good.”

“I brought her back,” Odell said.

The Prussian studied how Red Wing hugged close to Odell. “Ah, the spoils of war.”