Martin Pauley sprawled on a pile of sacked grain in Ranger Captain Sol Clinton’s tent, and waited. With Amos safe under medical care, of sorts, Mart saw a good chance to get some sleep; but the fits and starts of a wakeful doze seemed to be the best he could make of it. The Ranger was still wrangling with Brevet-Colonel Chester C. Greenhill over what they were about to do, if anything at all. He had been over there for two hours, and it ought to be almost enough. When he got back, Mart would hear whether or not five years’ search could succeed, and yet be altogether wasted.
Camp Radziminski was a flattish sag in the hills looking down upon Otter Creek—a place, not an installation. It had been a cavalry outpost, briefly, long ago; and an outfit of Rangers had wintered here once after that. In the deep grass you could still fall over the crumbling footings of mud-and-wattle walls and the precise rows of stones that had bordered military pathways; but the stockaded defenses were long gone.
Mart had been forced to transport Amos on a travois. This contraption was nothing but two long poles dragged from the saddle. The attached horse had shown confusion and some tendency to kick Amos’ head off, but it hadn’t happened. Mart found Radziminski before noon to his own considerable surprise. And the dead Comanche scout was proved to have told the truth with considerable exactness under Amos’ peculiarly effective methods of questioning.
Here were the “more than forty” Rangers, their wagon-sheet beds scattered haphazardly over the best of the flat ground, with a single tent to serve every form of administration and supply. Here, too, were the two short-handed companies of cavalry— about a hundred and twenty men—with a wagon train, an officer’s tent, a noncom’s tent, a supply tent, and a complement of pup tents sheltering two men each. This part of the encampment was incon-veniently placed, the Rangers having been here first; but the lines of tents ran perfectly straight anyway, defying the broken terrain.
And here, scattered up and down the slopes at random, were the brush wickiups of the “sixty or seventy” Tonkawas, almost the last of their breed. These were tall, clean, good-looking Indians, but said to be cannibals, and trusted by few; now come to fight beside the Rangers in a last doomed, expiring effort to win the good will of the white men who had conquered them.
As Mart had suspected, the Army and the Rangers were not working together at all. Colonel Greenhill had not, actually, come out to intercept the Rangers. Hadn’t known they were there. But, having run smack into them, he conceived his next duty to be that of sending them back where they belonged. He had been trying to get this done without too much untowardness for several days; and all concerned were now fit to be tied.
In consequence, Mart found Captain Sol Clinton in no mood to discuss the murder charge hanging over Mart and Amos, by reason of the killings at Lost Mule Creek. From this standpoint, Clinton told Mart, he had been frankly hopeful of never seeing either one of them again. Seeing’s they saw fit to thrust themselves upon him, he supposed he would have to do something technical about them later. But now he had other fish to fry—and by God, they seemed to have brought him the skillet! Come along here, and if you can’t walk any faster than that you can run, can’t you?
He took Mart to Colonel Greenhill who spent an hour questioning him in what seemed a lot like an effort to break his story; and sent him to wait in Clinton’s tent after. Sol Clinton had spoken with restraint while Mart was with them, but as Mart walked away he heard the opening guns of Sol’s argument roar like a blue norther, shaking the tent walls. “I’m sick and tired of war parties murdering the be-Jesus out of Texas families, then skedaddling to hide behind you yellowlegs! What are you fellers running, a damn Wild Indian sanctuary up here? The chief purpose of this here Union is to protect Texas—that’s how we understood it! Yonder’s a passel of murderers, complete with Tex-ican scalps and white girl captive! I say it’s up to you to protect us from them varmints by stepping the hell to one side while I—”
They had been at it for a long time, and they were still at it, though with reduced carrying power. Mart dozed a little, but was broad awake instantly as Sergeant Charlie MacCorry came in. Charlie seemed to have worked up to the position of right-hand man, or something, for he had stood around while Captain Clinton first talked to Mart, and he had been in Colonel Greenhill’s tent during Mart’s session there as well. His attitude toward Mart had seemed noncommittal—neither friendly nor stand-offish but quiet, rather, and abstracted. It seemed to Mart an odd and overkindly attitude for a Ranger sergeant to take toward a former prisoner who had slugged him down and got away. And now Charlie seemed to have something he wanted to say to Mart, without knowing how to bring it up. He warmed up by offering his views on the military situation.
“Trouble with the Army,” Charlie had it figured, “there’s always some damn fool don’t get the word, A fort sends some Colonel chasing all over creation after a bunch of hostiles; and he finds ’em, and jumps ’em, and makes that bunch a thing of the past; and what does he find out then? Them hostiles was already coming into a different fort under full-agreed truce. Picked ’em off right on the doorstep, by God. Done away with them peaceful Indians all unawares. Well! Now what you got? Investigations— boards—court-martials—and wham! Back goes the Colonel so many files he’s virtually in short pants. Happens every time.”
He paced the tent a few moments, two steps one way, two steps back, watching Mart covertly, as if expecting him to speak.
“Yeah,” Mart said at last.
Charlie seemed freed to say what he had on his mind. “Mart... I got a piece of news.”
“Oh?”
“Me and Laurie—we got married. Just before I left.”
Mart let his eyes drop while he thought it over. There had been a time, and it had gone on for years, when Laurie was always in his mind. She was the only girl he had ever known very well except those in the family. Or perhaps he had never known her, or any girl, at all. He reached for memories that would bring back her meaning to him. Laurie in a pretty dress, with her shoulders bare. Laurie joking about her floursack all-overs that had once read “Steamboat Mills” across her little bottom. Laurie in his arms, promising to come to him in the night...
All that should have mattered to him, but he couldn’t seem to feel it. The whole thing seemed empty, and dried out, without any real substance for him any more. As if it never could have come to anything, no matter what.
“Did you hear me?” Charlie asked. “I say, I married Laurie.”
“Yeah. Good for you. Got yourself a great girl.”
“No hard feelings?”
“No.”
They shook hands, briefly, as they always did; and Charlie changed the subject briskly. “You sure fooled me, scouting up this attack on Scar. I’d have swore that was the last thing you wanted. Unless you got Debbie out of there first. Being’s they’re so liable to brain their captives when they’re jumped. You think they won’t now?”
“Might not,” Mart said dully. He stirred restlessly. “What’s happened to them king-pins over there? They both died, or something?”
Charlie looked at him thoughtfully, unwilling to be diverted. “Is she—Have they—” He didn’t know how to put it, so that Mart would not be riled. “What I’m driving at—has she been with the bucks?”
Mart said, “Charlie, I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s more like—like they’ve done something to her mind.”
“You mean she’s crazy?”
“No—that isn’t it, rightly. Only—she takes their part now. She believes them, not us. Like as if they took out her brain, and put in an Indian brain instead. So that she’s an Indian now inside.”
Charlie believed he saw it now. “Doesn’t want to leave ’em, huh?”
“Almost seems like she’s an Indian herself now. Inside.”
“I see.” Charlie was satisfied. If she wanted to stay, she’d been with the bucks all right. Had Comanche brats of her own most likely.
“I see something now,” Mart said, “I never used to understand. I see now why the Comanches murder our women when they raid—brain our babies even—what ones they don’t pick to steal. It’s so we won’t breed. They want us off the earth. I understand that, because that’s what I want for them. I want them dead. All of them. I want them cleaned off the face of the world.”
Charlie shut up. Mart sounded touched in the head, and maybe dangerous. He wouldn’t have slapped Mart’s face again for thirty-seven dollars.
Sol Clinton came in, now, at last. He looked angry, yet satisfied and triumphant all at once. “I had to put us under his command,” the Ranger captain said. “I don’t even know if I legally can—but it’s done. Won’t matter, once we’re out ahead. We’re going to tie into ’em, boys!”
“The Tonks, too?”
“Tonkawas and all. Mart, you’re on pay as civilian guide. Can you find ’em again in the dark? Can you, hell—you’ve got to! I want to hit before sunrise— leave Greenhill come up as he can. You going to get us there?”
“That I am,” Mart said; and smiled for the first time that day.