Pringles ran up and down Mart’s back as they rode out of that village with the cur dogs bawling and blaspheming again all around them, just beyond kick-range of their horses’ feet. But until they were out of there they had to move unhurriedly, as if at peace and expecting peace. Even their eyes held straight ahead, lest so much as an exchange of glances be mis-read as a trigger for trouble.
Amos spoke first, well past the last of the lodges. “Did you see her?... Yeah,” he answered himself. “I see you did.” His reaction to the sudden climax of their search seemed to be the opposite of what Mart had expected. Amos seemed steadied, and turned cool.
“She’s alive,” Mart said. It seemed about the only thing his mind was able to think. “Can you realize it? Can you believe it? We found her, Amos!”
“Better start figuring how to stay alive yourself. Or finding her won’t do anybody much good.”
That was what was taking all the glory, all the exultation, out of their victory. They had walked into a hundred camps where they could have handled this situation, dangerous though it must always be. White captives had been bought and sold before time and again. Any Indian on earth but Scar would have concealed the girl, and played for time, until they found a way to deal.
“How in God’s name,” Mart asked him, “can this thing be? How could he let us walk into the lodge where she was? And keep her there before our eyes?”
“He meant for us to see her, that’s all!”
“This is a strange Comanche,” Mart said.
“This whole hunt has been a strange thing. And now we know why. Mart, did you see—there’s scarce a Comanch’ in that whole village we haven’t seen before.”
“I know.”
“We’ve even stood in that same one lodge before. Do you know where?”
“When we talked to Singing Dog on the Little Boggy.”
“That’s right. We talked to Singing Dog in Scar’s own lodge—while Scar took the girl and hid out. That’s how they’ve kept us on a wild-goose chase five years long. They’ve covered up, and decoyed for him, every time we come near.”
“We’ve caught up to him now!”
“Because he let us. Scar’s learned something few Indians ever know: He’s learned there’s such a thing as a critter that never quits follering or gives up. So he’s had enough. If we stood in the same lodge with her, and didn’t know her, well and good. But if we were going to find her, he wanted to see us do it.”
“So he saw—I suppose.”
“I think so. He has to kill us, Mart.”
“Bluebonnet didn’t think he had to kill us.”
“He never owned to having a white girl until Jaime Rosas made him a safe deal. And down there below the Llanos we was two men alone. Up here, we got Rangers, we got yellowlegs, to pull down on Scar. We rode square into the pocket where he was figuring to set until Davidson marched, and all soldiers was long gone. Scar don’t dast let us ride loose with the word.”
“Why’d he let us walk out of there at all?”
“I don’t know,” Amos said honestly. “Something tied his hands. If we knew what it was we could stretch it. But we don’t know.” Amos bent low over the horn to look back at the village under his arm. “They’re holding fast so far. Might even let us make a pass at settling down at the spring....”
But neither believed the Comanches would wait for night. Scar was a smart Indian, and a bitter one. The reason his squaws were on the honor side of the lodge where his sons should be was that Scar’s sons were dead, killed in war raids upon the likes of Mart and Amos. He would take no chances of a slip-up in the dark.
“We’ll make no two mistakes,” Amos said, and his tone was thoughtful. “They got some fast horses there. You saw them scouts whip up when they took a look at our back trail. Them’s racing ponies. And they got nigh two hours of daylight left.”
They reached the spring without sign of pursuit, and dismounted. Here they had a good three-furlong start, and would be able to see horses start from the village when the Comanches made their move. They would not, of course, be able to see warriors who ran crouching on foot, snaking on their bellies across open ground. But the Comanches hated action afoot. More probably they would try to close for the kill under pretense of bringing fresh meat, perhaps with squaws along as a blind. Or the Comanches might simply make a horse race of it. The fast war ponies would close their three-eighths-mile lead very easily, with even half an hour of daylight left. Some Indians were going to be killed but there could hardly be but one end.
They set to work on the one thin ruse they could think of. Mart kicked a fire together first—about the least token of a fire that would pass for one at all— and set it alight. Then they stripped saddles and packs. They would have to abandon these, in order to look as though they were not going any place. Bridles were left on the horses, and halters on the mules.
“We’ll lead out,” Amos said, “like hunting for the best grass. Try to get as much more lead as we can without stirring ’em up. First minute any leave the village, we’ll ease over a ridge, mount bareback— stampede the mules. Split up, of course—ride two ways—”
“We’ll put up a better fight if we stay together,” Mart objected.
“Yeah. We’d kill more Indians that way. There’s no doubt of it. But a whole lot more than that will be killed if one of us stays alive until dark—and makes Camp Radziminski.”
“Wait a minute,” Mart said. “If we lead the yellowlegs on ’em—or even the Rangers, with the Tonkawas they got—there’ll be a massacre, Amos! This village will be gutted out.”
“Yes,” Amos said.
“They’ll kill her—you know that! You saw it at Deadhorse Bend!”
“If I didn’t think so,” Amos said, “I’d have killed her myself.”
There was the substance of their victory after all this long time: One bitter taste of death, and then nothing more, forever.
“I won’t do this,” Mart said.
“What?”
“She’s alive. That means everything to me. Better she’s alive and living with Indians than her brains bashed out.”
A blaze of hatred lighted Amos’ eyes, while his face was still a mask of disbelief. “I can’t believe my own ears,” he said.
“I say there’ll be no massacre while she’s in that village! Not while I can stop it, or put it off!”
Amos got control of his voice. “What do you want to do?”
“First we got to live out the night. That I know and agree to. Beyond that, I don’t know. Maybe we got to come at Scar some far way round. But we stay together. Because I’m not running to the troops, Amos. And neither are you.”
Amos’ voice was half choked by the congestion of blood in his neck. “You think the likes of you could stop me?”
Mart pulled out the bit of paper upon which the will was written, in which Amos left Mart all he had. He tore it slowly into shreds, and laid them on the fire. “Yes,” he said, “I’ll stop you.”
Amos was silent for a long time. He stood with his shoulders slack, and his big hands hanging loose by his thighs, and he stared into space. When finally he spoke his voice was tired. “All right. We’ll stay together through the night. After that, we’ll see. I can’t promise no more.”
“That’s better. Now let’s get at it!”
“I’m going to tell you something,” Amos said. “I wasn’t going to speak of it. But if we fight, you got to murder all of ’em you can. So I’ll tell you now. Did you notice them scalps strung on Scar’s lance?”
“I was in there, wasn’t I?”
“They ain’t there,” Mart said. “Not Martha’s. Not Lucy’s. Not even Brad’s. Let’s—”
“Did you see the third scalp from the point of the lance?”
“I saw it.”
“Long, wavy. A red shine to it—”
“I saw it, I told you! You’re wasting—”
“You didn’t remember it. But I remember.” Amos’ voice was harsh, and his eyes bored into Mart’s eyes, as if to drive the words into his brain. “That was your mother’s scalp!”
No reason for Mart to doubt him. His mother’s scalp was somewhere in a Comanche lodge, if a living Indian still possessed it. Certainly it was not in her grave. Amos let him stand there a moment, while his unremembered people became real to him—his mother, with the pretty hair, his father, from whom he got his light eyes, his young sisters, Ethel and Becky, who were just names. He knew what kind of thing their massacre had been, because he had seen the Edwards place, and the people who had raised him, after the same thing happened there.
“Let’s lead off,” Amos said.
But before they had gone a rod, the unexpected stopped them. A figure slipped out the willows by the creek, and a voice spoke. Debbie was there— alone, so far as they could see she had materialized as an Indian does, without telltale sound of approach.
She moved a few halting steps out of the willow scrub, but stopped as Mart came toward her. He walked carefully, watching for movement in the thicket behind her. Behind him he heard the metallic crash as Amos chambered a cartridge. Amos had sprung onto a hummock, exposing himself recklessly while his eyes swept the terrain.
Mart was at four paces when Debbie spoke, urgently, in Comanche. “Don’t come too close. Don’t touch me! I have warriors with me.”
He had remembered the voice of a child, but what he was hearing was the soft-husky voice of a grown woman. Her Comanche was fluent, indistinguishable from that of the Indians, yet he thought he had never heard that harsh and ugly tongue sound uglier. He stopped six feet from her; one more inch, he felt, and she would have bolted. “Where are they, then?” he demanded. “Let ’em stand up and be counted, if they’re not afraid!”
Mystification came into her face; she stared at him with blank eyes. Suddenly he realized that he had spoken in a rush of English—and she no longer understood. The lost years had left an invisible mutilation as definite as if fingers were missing from her hand. “How many warriors?” he asked in gruff Comanche; and everything they said to each other was in Comanche after that.
“Four men are with me.”
His eyes jumped then, and swept wide; and though he saw nothing at all, he knew she might be telling the truth. If she had not come alone, he had to find out what was happening here, and quick. Their lives might easily depend upon their next guess. “What are you doing here?” he asked harshly.
“My—” He heard a wary hesitancy, a testing of words before they were spoken. “My—father—told me come.”
“Your what?”
“Yellow Buckle is my father.”
While he stared at her, sure he must have misunderstood the Comanche words, Amos put in. “Keep at her! Scar sent her all right. We got to know why!”
Watching her, Mart was sure Debbie had understood none of Amos’ Texan English. She tried to hurry her stumbling tale. “My father—he believes you. But some others—they know. They tell him— you were my people once.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I tell him I don’t know. I must come here. Make sure. I tell him I must come.”
“You told him nothing like that,” he contradicted her in Comanche. “He smash your mouth, you say ‘must’ to him!”
She shook her head. “No. No. You don’t know my father.”
“We know him. We call him Scar.”
“My father—Scar—” she accepted his name for the chief—“He believes you. He says you are Comancheros. Like you say. But soon—” she faltered— “soon he knows.”
“He knows now,” he contradicted her again. “You are lying to me!”
Her eyes dropped, and her hands hid themselves in her ragged wash-leather sleeves. “He says you are Comancheros,” she repeated. “He believes you. He told me. He—”
He had an exasperated impulse to grab her and shake her; but he saw her body tense. If he made a move toward her she would be gone in the same instant. “Debbie, listen to me! I’m Mart! Don’t you remember me?” He spoke just the names in English, and it was obvious that these two words were familiar to her.
“I remember you,” she said gravely, slowly, across the gulf between them. “I remember. From always.”
“Then stop lying to me! You got Comanches with you—so you say. What do you want here if you’re not alone?”
“I come to tell you, go away! Go tonight. As soon as dark. They can stop you. They can kill you. But this one night—I make him let you go.”
“Make him?” He was so furious he stammered. “You make him? No squaw alive can move Scar a hand span—you least of all!”
“I can,” she said evenly, meeting his eyes. “I am— bought. I am bought for—to be—for marriage. My— man—he pays sixty ponies. Nobody ever paid so much. I’m worth sixty ponies.”
“We’ll overcall that,” he said. “Sixty ponies! We’ll pay a hundred for you—a hundred and a half—”
She shook her head.
“My man—his family—”
“You own five times that many ponies yourself— you know that? We can bring them—many as he wants—and enough cattle to feed the whole tribe from here to—”
“My man would fight. His people would fight. They are very many. Scar would lose—lose everything.”
Comanche thoughts, Comanche words—a white woman’s voice and form …the meeting toward which he had worked for years had turned into a nightmare. Her face was Debbie’s face, delicately made, and now in the first bloom of maturity; but all expression was locked away from it. She held it wooden, facing him impassively, as an Indian faces a stranger. Behind the surface of this long-loved face was a Comanche squaw.
He spoke savagely, trying to break through to the Debbie of long ago. “Sixty ponies,” he said with contempt. “What good is that? One sleep with Indians— you’re a mare—a sow—they take what they want of you. Nothing you can do would turn Scar!”
“I can kill myself,” she said.
In the moment of silence, Amos spoke again. “String it out. No move from the village yet. Every minute helps.”
Mart looked into the hard green eyes that should have been lovely and dear to him; and he believed her. She was capable of killing herself, and would do it if she said she would. And Scar must know that. Was this the mysterious thing that had tied Scar’s hands when he let them walk away? An accident to a sold but undelivered squaw could cost Scar more than sixty ponies. It could cost him his chiefship, and perhaps his life.
“That is why you can go now,” she said, “and be safe. I have told him—my father—”
His temper flared up. “Stop calling that brute your father!”
“You must get away from here,” she said again, monotonously, almost dropping into a ritual Comanche singsong. “You must go away quick. Soon he will know. You will be killed—”
“You bet I’m getting out of here,” he said, breaking into English. “And I got no notion of getting killed, neither! Amos! Grab holt that black mule! She’s got to ride that!”
He heard leather creak as Amos swung up a saddle. No chance of deception now, from here on; they had to take her and run.
Debbie said, “What—?”
He returned to Comanche. “You’re going with us now! You hear me?”
“No,” Debbie said. “Not now. Not ever.”
“I don’t know what they have done to you. But it makes no difference!” He wouldn’t have wasted time fumbling Comanche words if he had seen half a chance of taking her by main force. “You must come with me. I take you to—”
“They have done nothing to me. They take care of me. These are my people.”
“Debbie, Debbie—these—these Nemenna murdered our family!”
“You lie.” A flash of heat-lightning in her eyes let him see an underlying hatred, unexpected and dreadful.
“These are the ones! They killed your mother, cut her arm off—killed your own real father, slit his belly open—killed Hunter, killed Ben—”
“Wichitas killed them! Wichitas and white men! To steal cows—”
“What?”
“These people saved me. They drove off the whites and the Wichitas. I ran in the brush. Scar picked me up on his pony. They have told me it all many times!” He was blanked again, helpless against lies drilled into her over the years.
Amos had both saddles cinched up. “Watch your chance,” he said. “You know now what we got to do.”
Debbie’s eyes went to Amos in quick suspicion, but Mart was still trying. “Lucy was with you. You know what happened to her!”
“Lucy—went mad. They—we—gave her a pony—”
“Pony! They—they—” He could not think of the word for rape. “They cut her up! Amos—Bull Shoulders—he found her, buried her—”
“You lie,” she answered, her tone monotonous again, without heat. “All white men lie. Always.”
“Listen! Listen to me! I saw my own mother’s scalp on Scar’s lance—there in the lodge where you live!”
“Lies,” she said, and looked at him sullenly, untouched. “You Long Knives—you are the evil ones. You came in the night, and started killing us. There by the river.”
At first he didn’t know what she was talking about; then he remembered Dead horse Bend and Debbie’s locket that had seemed to tell them she had been there. He wondered if she had seen the old woman cut down, who wore her locket, and the old man sabered, as he tried to save his squaw.
“I saw it all,” she said, as if answering his thought.
Mart changed his tone. “I found your locket,” he said gently. “Do you remember your little locket? Do you remember who gave it to you? So long ago....”
Her eyes faltered for the first time; and for a moment he saw in this alien woman the little girl of the miniature, the child of the shrine in the dream.
“At first—I prayed to you,” she said.
“You what?”
“At first—I cried. Every night. For a long time. I cried to you—come and get me. Take me home. You didn’t come.” Her voice was dead, all feeling washed out of it.
“I’ve come now,” he said.
She shook her head. “These are my people. You— you are Long Knives. We hate you—fight you— always, till we die.”
Amos said sharply, “They’re mounting up now, up there. We got to go.” He came over to them in long, quick strides, and spoke in Comanche, but loudly, as some people speak to foreigners. “You know Yellow Buckle thing?” he demanded, backing his words with signs. “Buckle, Scar wear?”
“The medicine buckle,” she said clearly.
“Get your hands on it. Turn it over. Can you still read? On the back it says white man’s words ‘Ethan to Judith.’ Scratched in the gold. Because Scar tore it off Mart’s mother when he killed and scalped her!”
“Lies,” Debbie repeated in Comanche.
“Look and see for yourself!”
Amos had been trying to work around Debbie, to cut her off from the willows and the river, but she was watching him, moving enough to keep clear. “I go back now,” she said. “To my father’s lodge. I can do nothing here.” Her movements brought her no closer to Mart, but suddenly his nostrils caught the distinct, unmistakable Indian odor, alive, immediate, near. For an instant the unreasoning fear that this smell had brought him, all through his early years, came back with a sickening chill of revulsion. He looked at the girl with horror.
Amos brought him out of it. “Keep your rifle on her, Mart! If she breaks, stun her with the butt!” He swayed forward, then lunged to grab her.
She wasn’t there. She cried out a brief phrase in Comanche as she dodged him, then was into the brush, running like a fox. “Git down!” Amos yelled, and fired his rifle from belt level, though not at her; while simultaneously another rifle fired through the space in which Debbie had stood. Its bullet whipped past Mart’s ear as he flung himself to the ground. The Comanche who had fired on him sprang up, face to the sky, surprisingly close to them, then fell back into the thin grass in which he had hidden.
Dirt jumped in Mart’s face, and a ricochet yowled over. He swiveled on his belt buckle, and snapfired at a wisp of gunsmoke sixty yards away in the brush. He saw a rifle fall and slide clear of the cover. Amos was standing straight up, trading shots with a third sniper. “Got him,” he said, and instantly spun half around, his right leg knocked from under him. A Comanche sprang from an invisible depression less than thirty yards away, and rushed with drawn knife. Mart fired, and the Indian’s legs pumped grotesquely as he fell, sliding him on his face another two yards before he was still. All guns were silent then; and Mart went to Amos.
“Go on, God damn it!” Blood pumped in spurts from a wound just above Amos’ knee. “Ride, you fool! They’re coming down on us!”
The deep thrumming of numberless hoofs upon the prairie turf came to them plainly from a quarter mile away. Mart sliced off a pack strap, and twisted it into a tourniquet. Amos cuffed him heavily alongside the head, pleading desperately. “For God’s sake, Mart, will you ride? Go on! Go on!”
The Comanches weren’t yelling yet, perhaps wouldn’t until they struck. Of all the Wild Tribes, the Comanches were the last to start whooping, the first to come to close grips. Mart took precious seconds more to make an excuse for a ban dage. “Get up here!” he grunted, stubborn to the bitter last; and he lifted Amos.
One of the mules was down, back broken by a bullet never meant for it. It made continual groaning, whistling noises as it clawed out with its fore hoofs, trying to drag up its dead hindquarters. The other mules had stampeded, but the horses still stood, snorting and sidestepping, tied to the ground by their long reins. Mart got Amos across his shoulders, and heaved him bodily into the saddle. “Get your foot in the stirrup! Gimme that!” He took Amos’ rifle, and slung it into the brush. “See can you tie yourself on with the saddle strings as we ride!”
He grabbed his own pony, and made a flying mount as both animals bolted. Sweat ran down Amos’ face; the bullet shock was wearing off, but he rode straight up, his wounded leg dangling free. Mart leaned low on the neck, and his spurs raked deep. Both horses stretched their bellies low to the ground, and dug out for their lives, as the first bullets from the pursuit buzzed over. The slow dusk was closing now. If they could have had another half hour, night would have covered them before they were overtaken.
They didn’t have it. But now the Comanches did another unpredictable, Indian kind of a thing. With their quarry in full view, certain to be flanked and forced to a stand within the mile, the Comanches stopped. Repeated signals passed forward, calling the leaders in; the long straggle of running ponies lost momentum, and sucked back upon itself. The Comanches bunched up, and sat their bareback ponies in a close mass—seemingly in argument.
Things like that had happened before that Mart knew about, though never twice quite the same. Sometimes the horse Indians would fight a brilliant battle, using the fast-breaking cavalry tactics at which they were the best on earth—and seem to be winning; then unexpectedly turn and run. If you asked them later why they ran, they would say they ran because they had fought enough. Pursued, they might turn abruptly and fight again as tenaciously as before—and explain they fought then because they had run enough....
This time they came on again after another twenty-five minutes; or, at least, a picked party of them did. Looking back as he topped a ridge, Mart saw what looked like a string of perhaps ten warriors, barely visible in the last of the light, coming on fast at three miles. He turned at a right angle, covered by the ridge, and loped in the new direction for two miles more. The dusk had blackened to almost solid dark when he dismounted to see what he could do for Amos.
“Never try to guess an Indian,” Amos said thickly, and slumped unconscious. He hung to the side of the horse by the saddle strings he had tied into his belt, until Mart cut him down.
Camp Radziminski was twenty miles away.