The Texans (9 page)

What the Prussian would have admitted, had anybody been there to ask him, was the fact that the promise of another bloody fight with the Comanche excited him more than the woman or his position in Texas political affairs. He would take his prizes as they came to him, but war trumped all pleasures.

Thinking of Red Wing and glory made him push the Kentucky horse a little faster down the trail to San Antonio, and his hand went inadvertently to his saber handle. He intended to one day be the king of Texas, and as such, he would need a queen—Sam Houston, Comanches, or anyone else who got in his way be damned.

Chapter 11

O
dell gathered his buffalo robe tighter about his throat and shivered in the breeze. A good squaw would have done a better job, but he'd tried to tan the hide himself and it was stiff and almost unmanageable. His hand cramped from holding the hard, dried edges of the ill-cured robe tight enough to keep the cold from leaking in. A late spring norther had blown a short-lived snowstorm down on the plains and had almost frozen him. But that was nothing unusual. It seemed the country had been trying to kill him ever since he left his home to chase Comanches.

When the April storm had struck in the night he'd been unable to light a fire, so he saddled Crow and just let the wind carry them along, hoping that by keeping moving they wouldn't freeze to death. Although the blizzard had barely lasted until daylight, that was more than enough time to drive him far enough south on the plains that he didn't have a clue where he was at. But that was nothing new either. Since leaving the Wichitas he had grown used to not knowing his exact location on a map, even if there had been proper maps of the country he rode. He had decided that half the battle was just getting used to being lost, and he was content to simply wander. If he could find his way to the nearest water in time to save himself, then he considered it a good day. The plains he rode were flat and almost without landmarks, and he had come to think that feeling lost went with the territory, at least for a white man.

The sun was leaking white light through cracks in the gray clouds and the wind had shifted again to blow from the south. That was the thing about the plains—it could be spring one moment and winter the next. He could already feel it warming up and hoped it would be spring again by the late afternoon.

Despite the fact that the storm was over, he couldn't quit shivering or seem to warm himself. Most of the ground was free from snow, as the wind had swept it into powdery white lines that ran in long, wavy rows across the prairie. What he needed was a fire, but he wasn't sure his cold-stiffened fingers would function well enough to gather some buffalo chips, much less strike an accurate spark from his flint and steel.

Just when he'd given up hope of warmth and had decided to angle east to the caprock that edged the Llano Estacado somewhere in the distance, he spotted a campfire burning brightly through the early morning light. It seemed very near, but his eyes often fooled him on such an expanse of nothing, and the fire turned out to be almost three miles away.

Odell had nearly gotten himself killed by various follies during his fall and winter upon the plains, but he had learned to approach campfires cautiously. Most of those he ran across out on the buffalo grass were liable to be his enemies. He did cut a wide quarter circle around the flickering orange eye before him, but he was pretty sure that whoever was stopped there wouldn't be Indians, or at least not very many of them. Most Indians had better sense than to be caught out in the open during a blizzard without at least the shelter of a tepee. Although spring was at hand, most of the Comanche were still huddled up in their winter camps in the canyons north along the Canadian and Red, or east along the edge of the high walls of the escarpment that fronted the headwaters of the Brazos and Red Rivers.

What Odell found beside the fire was a single little man with his feet propped up on a rock to warm them before the flames. Well, that wasn't entirely true, as the man had no feet or much above that either, and it was merely the scarred stumps of his legs shorn off just above the knees that must have needed warming. The only other occupant of the camp, if it could be called that, was a skinny burro that stood three-legged with its side practically in the small fire. It appeared to be asleep, and must have been cold, because Odell was sure that the hair on its ribs was getting singed.

“Mind if I use your fire? I have a little buffalo meat to share.” Odell pulled up at a polite distance.

The little man beside the fire didn't answer and seemed content to study the stumps of his short legs stretched out before him. Odell assumed that the Mexican might have been asleep like the little donkey, or else he didn't speak English. He stepped down from his saddle anyway and loosened Crow's cinch. After rummaging around in his saddlebags he drug out the dry buffalo tongue he'd been carrying there for the better part of two days. He carried it over to the fire.

The Mexican was awake, and the sight of the buffalo tongue seemed to interest him more than Odell's arrival had.

“You
habla
English?” Odell asked.

“
Sí
, I speak a little,” the Mexican said through his broken and rotten teeth.

“You look like you're having maybe a harder time than me and could use a little something to eat.”

Odell thought the Mexican was a poor sight indeed, and it was not just the fact that the man was a cripple that gave him that impression. The Mexican was obviously shoeless, but he was also hatless. His long black hair hung over most of his shriveled face, and it was so interwoven and tangled with grass and prairie debris that it might not have even been hair at all. It reminded Odell of the mat of wooly tangles covering the shoulders, neck, and head on a buffalo in winter prime.

The Mexican's woven wool serape was soiled and torn and unraveled to what had to have been half its former size. Beneath that, the man wore a rotting sheepskin vest, wool side out, that smelled just like it looked, and a pair of thin cotton pants that might have once been white a hundred years before. Odell was cold even beneath his heavy buffalo robe, but the little Mexican didn't have so much as a single goose bump showing on the portions of his bare shoulders that were visible before his arms disappeared under the cover of the serape.

“Do you have a pot to boil this tongue in?” Odell asked as he hunkered down before the fire between the Mexican and the burro.

The Mexican shook his head somberly, and one of his skinny arms withdrew from the serape to wave dramatically around him at his lack of possessions. Odell saw nothing that the man might own other than the burro, who had finally awakened long enough to swap the hind foot he was resting on before closing his eyes again.

“I reckon I can just cook this tongue over the fire,” Odell said. The Wichitas he'd lived with had considered the tongue a prime cut of meat, as did many a frontiersman. But Odell had no squaws to chew on the tongue and tenderize it, nor a pot to boil it in long enough to soften the dense muscle.

A little trickle of drool leaked out of one corner of the Mexican's mouth while Odell skinned the tongue with his butcher knife. He crosscut it into thin slices, going against the grain of the muscle. There were no sticks available to roast the meat on, so he laid it out on the ground while he went to fetch the ramrod from his rifle hanging on his saddle. By the time he got back to the fire the Mexican was already chewing on a raw chunk of the tongue. He seemed extremely happy with the taste of it from the rapturous look on his face.

“I take it you ain't picky about your cooking,” Odell said while he poked holes in a couple of pieces of the tongue and slid the brass end of his ramrod through them.

“I haven't eaten in four days, maybe five,” the Mexican managed to say while he gummed around on the tough meat.

“Cuántas dias? Cinco?”
Odell thought the Mexican dangerously skinny, but five days without food seemed a little unbelievable for a man still alive, even a walking skeleton with most of his legs missing.

“I ate a scorpion and a little green beetle I found while crawling to my donkey yesterday, or maybe it was the day before.” The Mexican seemed a little bothered by the measuring of time.

“I admit provisions are scarce in these parts, but I take it you aren't much of a hunter.”

“I have no gun, and as you can see, I'm not swift enough to run down a buffalo or an antelope. I don't even have teeth enough to hang on if I were to catch one.” The Mexican had managed to swallow his raw meat and was looking longingly at the remaining tongue at Odell's feet. Odell pitched him the pieces one at a time, and the Mexican caught them one-handed. Before Odell could offer him the use of his ramrod to cook them with, the man stuck another raw chunk in his mouth with the utmost pleasure.

“I sometimes find a dead carcass, but I can't always whip the wolves off of it,” the Mexican added.

“These plains are a hell of a place for a man in your condition,” Odell said. “What brings you out here?”

The little Mexican considered the question for a long time while he worried his meal around under the jaw teeth in one cheek. “I gather honey and sell it to the traders in Santa Fe.”

Odell looked at the empty prairie surrounding them and thought the man was as crazy as he looked. There wasn't a tree anywhere for miles, and not even a single flower blooming amidst the dry grass. “I don't know where you'd find honey out here. Bees are bound to be as rare as water.”

The Mexican started to laugh but seemed to run out of energy before he could. “Oh, no, I did my hunting in the mountains west of the Pecos. There are lots of beehives in the rocks there.”

“Well, what brought you out on this godforsaken flat?”

The Mexican did laugh at that. “God is here too.”

Odell looked around them again. “I'd say he ain't. If he was, he'd be real easy to spot.”

“He is here, it's just a matter of knowing where to look, like spotting a single bee flying to or from the hive. A man can get caught up looking at all the nothing and miss what is right before him and all around him.”

“Well, I'd say that's a funny way for a God to operate.”

“The greatest mystery is why He even bothers with us at all.” The Mexican crossed himself three times and muttered something to the Virgin Mary in Spanish.

“You ain't said how you ended up out here if you're a bee hunter.”

“The bees disappeared above the Pecos, and I had a dream there was a canyon of honey to the east.”

“You came across the plains in your shape because you had a dream?” Odell held his meat over the fire and tried to keep from scorching it.

“Dreams are not to be taken lightly. Sometimes I'm not sure if this is the dream, and the lives we live in our sleep are the reality.”

“You must be a man of great faith to venture out here with nothing but a donkey and two little stubs for legs,” Odell said. “Why, you don't even have anything to carry water in. How'd you make it this far?”

“I crawl to my burro every morning and then ride until I fall asleep. Sometimes he carries me while I dream, and sometimes I fall off and that is where we camp.” The Mexican was already sticking another piece of buffalo tongue in his mouth. He started off again in Spanish, but saw the confusion on Odell's face and swapped back to his broken English. “
Gracias a Dios y sangre de Cristo
, he leads me to water when I need it. I drank yesterday evening from a buffalo wallow that still held a little water from the last rain.”

Odell took his own breakfast from the fire and set it aside to cool. He himself had once tried following a herd of buffalo to some kind of water, but the stagnant, bug-ridden mudhole he found made him sick and worse off than he'd been before he discovered it.

“God provides if we have but a little faith,” the Mexican said.

“He doesn't seem to be too generous with you,” Odell pointed to the terrible scars where the Mexican's knees had once been. “What happened to your legs?”

“Iron Shirt broke my ankles and then gave me a knife to cut off my feet.”

“Iron Shirt?”

“He's a medicine chief. I've been long on the Llano, but he's the meanest Comanche I've run across. I once had some sheep and a woman at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, but Iron Shirt carried them away. I once hunted buffalo with the men of my village, but he killed many of us, stole my horse, and took my weapons. And when I decided to gather honey he caught me and roped me by the feet and drug me out on the Llano to die.”

Odell tried to take a bite of the meat on his ramrod but it was too tough, and he had to stuff a whole piece in his mouth. His jaws were strong and his teeth in far better shape than the Mexican's, but they were no match for the tough tongue. The juice was at least satisfying, and he spat out the piece for a new one once he'd worked it dry.

“I thought you said Iron Shirt gave you a knife so you could cut your feet off. How come he didn't just do it himself?”

The Mexican laughed in a way that was a little disturbing. “He and his warriors sat around and watched to see if I could cut my feet off myself. They were already rotting before he gave me the knife and I would die if I didn't do it. It was more fun for Iron Shirt to wait and see if I would suffer more to live as a cripple than to torture me anymore himself. Comanches have strange senses of humor.”

“So you cut your own legs off?”

“I did. My calves had already started turning black by the time I found my courage, and I wanted to make sure I cut high enough to get above the poison. After that, I stuck my stumps in a fire to stop the bleeding. I screamed until I lost my voice for many days.”