The soreness reached to the very core of Jacob’s bones, making it difficult for him to move. The strain of the grueling footrace with High Walking, and then sleeping on the hard ground without a blanket, had nearly crippled him. He glanced around to check on the Indian.
High Walking was squatting in the morning twilight and cutting at a spineless, low-growing cactus with his knife. The plant had a round, wrinkled top that was almost flat. Its flowers were dry and shriveled, and their once bright pink had turned brown.
Methodically the Comanche cut the flesh of the cactus into bite-sized pieces. He stuffed a large, double handful into his pocket. The remaining portion he gave to Jacob.
“This is peyote,” High Walking said. “Comanche use it in many ways, eat it, drink it as a tea, or breathe its powder up their noses. You must eat some now. Soon you will feel very strong. Also, it relieves the crowded mind and lessens a man’s sorrow.” High Walking stuffed a chunk of the peyote in his mouth and began to chew.
Jacob did likewise. The moist flesh of the plant was bland. And yet, as he chewed, he sensed the narcotic effect, a soothing of his nerves and a strengthening of his muscles through the soreness. The dawn around him filled with a pleasant aroma, a familiar one he recognized. It was Petra’s sachet. He started to make a hurried look around before he recalled that Petra was dead. The odor was false, a trick of the peyote on his mind.
Jacob stood up. His thirst for revenge had not been dulled by the drug. He picked up his weapons and turned to the Indian.
High Walking saw the burning light in Jacob’s eyes. “Now you are ready to run. Perhaps you will be able to keep up with me.” His face screwed itself into a grimace around his own glowing eyes. “Tonight you will have very bad dreams. That is the effect of the peyote as its power deserts you.”
High Walking pointed to the east where a bright swath of red dawn was spreading as the sun burst from below the horizon. “That is an omen. We will spill the blood of our enemies today.”
“Or lose our own,” breathed Jacob in a whisper that only he could hear. But he would take many of Petra’s killers into the darkness with him.
* * *
Jacob, trailing his long rifle in his hand, ran beside High Walking as they raced through the heat waves pouring from the hot earth. The vast flatness of the Llano Estacado had swallowed them, and they were lost in the tall plains grass that surrounded them mile upon weary mile. A slow wind moved, tossing the grass reeds into thousands of waves, crests pursuing troughs, as though they were part of the surface of a great sea.
The running men easily followed the trail of the stolen herd of livestock by sign both on the ground and in the air. The thousands of hard hooves had tromped the grass into the brown soil, and the raw trail cut like an open wound in the green prairie. On the vortices of the up-drafts along the trail, vultures were tracing wide, swinging circles before beginning to drop toward the earth.
Down, down they came by the score, to level off above the ground and come up on the scent of a dead sheep or cow.
As Jacob and High Walking approached, the carrion eaters craned their skinny necks and bald heads toward them and hopped around nervously with wings half unfolded. Then, unable to endure the nearness of the running men, the buzzards rose in a cloud, a living black pall that climbed upward.
The men began to encounter pockets of grasshoppers. Soon they were fluttering up in swarms, their yellow wings with black spots clacking and chittering. A coyote feeding on a sheep darted out of the path of the runners. He stopped off a way, with just his head showing above the grass, and watched the men pass by.
In the noon heat Jacob’s heart beat rapidly. His tortured breath was rushing with a hoarse sawing sound through his throat. The hollows of his lungs felt as if they were being scalded. His legs trembled with exhaustion, yet he could not stop, for the damn Comanche ran on and on.
High Walking cut a look across at the gray-bearded white man. “The sheep and the Texans cannot be many miles ahead. Can you run some more?”
“You catch them,” Jacob called back grimly between breaths. “I’ll be there with my gun.”
Jacob saw the Indian put another piece of peyote into his mouth. Jacob, himself, began to chew on a new piece.
* * *
By mid-afternoon Jacob’s breath was sobbing in his throat as he reached the extreme limit of his mortal strength. He opened his mouth to call out that he must rest or die. Then he saw the large gray smudge on the grass-covered plain ahead.
High Walking also spotted the herd of livestock. He halted abruptly and fell to his knees, hunkering low.
High Walking flung a look at Jacob, and his mouth opened in a great, silent cry of pleasure. He gripped his war bow and shook it savagely at the enemy.
Jacob watched the Indian’s face, creased and drawn with fatigue. The Comanche’s lungs heaved as he caught his wind. His copper-colored skin glistened with sweat, shining like a dark silken cloth. His eyes, sunk in deeply caved-in sockets, burned with his eagerness to kill.
“The livestock of the Texans makes a lot of dust,” said Jacob. “By staying hidden behind it, we can go close. But we must be careful. There are ten or twelve men, and they have horses to ride us down.”
“In the light of the day they are many and strong. In the night we two are stronger, for then we can attack when and where we choose.”
Jacob looked to the west. The sun was barely a finger’s width above the horizon. “Soon it will be dark. Let’s go on.”
The two men moved like ghosts through the dust cloud that rolled toward them like fog off a winter sea.
* * *
The moon slid out of the east, making the faces of the Comanche and white man oddly animal-like. The men lay in the tall grass and spied on the camp of the raiders. For the last two hundred yards they had snaked forward on their stomachs and now were not fifty feet from a small, yellow-flamed fire.
Jacob looked into the bubble of firelight that held back the night. A covered pot sat boiling in the edge of the bed of coals and flames. He counted five saddles lying scattered about. Bedrolls, two packsaddles, and other supplies were in a mound on the far side of the fire. Beyond those items, and partially illuminated by the flames, was a grove of hackberry trees some ten to twelve feet tall.
A young man with a sheep carcass over his shoulder walked into the light. He dumped his load to the ground. He bent and made cuts with his knife between the tendons and bones of the animal’s rear hocks. Thongs were inserted through the openings in the legs, and the body of the sheep was hung from a limb of one of the hackberry trees. With deft, quick strokes of his blade the man skinned the sheep down to the head and stopped there to let the fleece hang and drag on the ground.
The Texan cut the tenderloins from both sides of the backbone. He sliced the long slender pieces of mutton into chunks and dumped them in the pot. Other ingredients were added from a pouch. He built up the fire around the pot.
The grass rustled at a puff of night wind, and High Walking whispered to Jacob, “There is only one man.” There was a tone of regret in his voice.
“I count five saddles, so there are others. The man that escaped at the river has warned them about us. Somewhere out there in the grass or among the sheep, they’re hiding and waiting.”
The leader and his lieutenants had gone on to Texas, reasoned Jacob. They would leave these peons to do the hard work of driving the herd of livestock five, maybe six hundred miles to a place where they could be sold.
“These men don’t know how close we might be, or even if we still follow,” said Jacob. “So this fellow cooks a hot supper. We have to be patient, for the others will come to fill their hungry guts. Then we’ll kill them.”
High Walking turned his black mask of a face to Jacob. “You talk too much,” he said. “I do not need someone to tell me how to fight.”
“I don’t want any of them to escape.”
“None will escape. I will kill more of them than you do.”
Jacob grunted his disdain at the Comanche’s remark. “Let’s leave the cook till last.”
“First we must take their horses and hide them. Then no one can ride away from us.”
“I agree,” said Jacob. “I heard a nicker off in that direction. There’ll be at least one guard.”
They crept in a circle to the left around the fire-lit camp. Jacob saw the flock of thousands of sheep and a few hundred cows to the east on the moon-silvered plain. The backs of the sheep were barely visible above the top of the grass. The larger bodies of the cows, casting long shadows, were magnified by the slanting rays of the moon, still low on the horizon. A subdued, weary baaing from the sheep reached him.
In the middle of the herd of livestock, moonlight reflected off a shiny surface. The water from the recent rainstorm had collected in one of the depressions sometimes found on the plain. However, the pond would be very shallow and gone in a few days, sucked away by the hot, thirsty sun.
Jacob saw the indistinct forms of horses. He counted seven of them. Two of those would be pack animals. His judgment of the size of the band of raiders at five had been correct, unless some men were mounted and not in sight. He should be cautious of that possibility.
The two men hunkered lower in the grass and veered farther away. They came up the wind so as not to alert the horses. The moon was behind the grazing beasts, making shadowy silhouettes of their forms.
Jacob stopped. A man had moved among the horses. He was turned as if watching the faint glow of the campfire.
Jacob touched High Walking and pointed. The Comanche nodded.
High Walking drew one of the jasper-tipped arrows from his quiver. He nocked the shaft on the gut string of his powerful war bow. He pulled the cord to his cheek.
The bowstring twanged. The arrow leapt toward the man.
Jacob caught the barest fleeting glimpse of the hurtling bolt. Then the shaft vanished into the chest of the guard.
The man crumpled to his knees and pitched forward in the tall grass. He uttered not a sound.
“One dead,” High Walking said.
The men waited, their eyes wrestling with the darkness. The grass bent and bowed in the wind. The moon walked along its ancient, endless path. With low, tearing sounds the horses cropped the rich, ripe seed heads of the wild plains grass.
Jacob spoke. “The man you killed must have been the only guard. Let’s take the horses and hide them.”
Quietly they pulled the tethering stakes from the earth and led the cayuses a quarter of a mile west. There the horses were again tied on the ends of lariats.
“Now we will return quickly to the camp of our enemies,” said High Walking. “I want to have my revenge. First we will find and kill any rider watching the sheep and cattle.”
The two men made a wary turn around the scattered herd. The weary animals took no notice of the skulking figures. Not one guard was located, and Jacob and High Walking stole back over the plain.
Drawing near the camp, they dropped to their knees and crawled close. The light in the camp had weakened, the fire throwing only a red luminescence from a bed of glowing coals.
The low mumble of voices came from the edge of the darkness beyond the fire. Jacob caught the words. The Texans were assigning the hours of the night guards.
Jacob strained his sight to pierce the murk and pick out the targets. The Texans figured themselves to be safe in the night. They were wrong. Jacob made out the indistinct forms of four men sitting on the ground. Their arms moved as they ate. That is your last meal, he thought.
He leaned toward High Walking and spoke. “You take the men on the left. I’ll take those on the right. Don’t stop shooting till every man is dead.”
He loosened his pistol in its holster, and then gripped his rifle. He couldn’t see the sights of the gun in the dark. But he wasn’t worried about that. At this short range he could simply point the long-barreled weapon and hit the center of a man.
High Walking rose to his knees. The bow bent in his hands. The taut string hummed. He released the arrow. The speeding shaft jumped across the bed of coals into the darkness.
A man screamed. Once.
“Bastard!” exclaimed Jacob. The Indian should have made his assault on the raiders at the same instant as Jacob. The man was unpredictable and therefore dangerous. Jacob jerked his rifle up and fired at a dim form just beginning to rise from the ground.
The blackness of the night seemed to ripple from the concussion of the gunshot. The man fell backward with a harsh expulsion of air.
The two remaining Texans were scrambling to their feet. Their hands clawed at holstered pistols.
Jacob grabbed his revolver and shot at one of the raiders. The man sank to his knees and pitched forward, his face plowing into the hard ground.
High Walking had again bent his bow. He released the string, flinging an arrow at the shadow of the last man spinning to run away. The shaft struck the middle of the shadow, driving it backward. A guttural moan came out of the gloom. Then all was silent.
High Walking looked through the night at Jacob. Neither man spoke. Jacob knew their presence together was only a matter of convenience, of joining strengths and weapons to better kill other men. When the battles had ended, the Comanche might decide to fight him.
High Walking pulled his knife and, holding it poised to strike, went from body to body. He checked the last one and called out to Jacob. “All are dead.”
“Then let’s see what the Texans have that we can use.” Jacob collected a handful of brambles from under the hackberry trees and tossed them on the hot coals. Short flames burst into life.
In the night Jacob gathered a rifle, pistol, and ammunition from one of the dead men. He took a section of canvas, a two-gallon canteen of water, and a quantity of food from the pile of supplies. All of the items were stowed in one of the packs. A saddle was selected from the ones the Texans had used.
Satisfied he could leave at a moment’s notice and be well provisioned, Jacob took a tin plate he’d found in the packs and filled it from the pot near the fire. He began to eat.
The mutton stew was delicious. He chewed hard, feeling a strange sense of pleasure at the thought of eating the food of his foes.
“Try some,” Jacob said, pointing at the pot with his spoon. “It’s very good.”
The Comanche looked at Jacob with a bitter stare. “The man I had hoped to slay was not one of those,” he said, gesturing at the dead bodies. “I have seen him up close enough to know. He is tall with red hair.”
“The chief could be a hundred miles east of here. But now we have horses and can ride them down. Eat, for we need to be strong.”
In the flickering light of the fire Jacob saw the haunted, sorrowful expression on the Indian’s face. Did his own countenance also show his terrible anguish?
The Comanche spat at the pot of food. He extracted a piece of peyote from his pouch and began to chew it. He stalked into the night. “I will bring up the horses,” he called back.
Jacob had lost his appetite. High Walking and he had killed some of their enemies but not their leaders. Those men had planned the murders and had a higher priority to die. And they had escaped.
He went to meet High Walking and helped stake out the horses. As he worked, he saw a nimbus of hazy mist forming around the moon. A ring of light was visible through the mist close around the yellow sphere. By the density of the high, cold moisture and the swiftness with which it had come hurrying in, he judged that the weather was changing, and that rain would fall within a day.
The last horse was fastened to the end of a lariat. The Comanche, without a sign, turned and walked off, becoming lost in the darkness.
Jacob picked up a blanket and, selecting a spot near a tall horse, lay down. As he watched the haze thicken around the moon, he sensed that his days remaining upon the earth had a small number, and were of little value. Except for his revenge.
During the night he dreamed of fighting a gun battle with a swarm of Texans on a windy plain. He could see Petra far off, beckoning to him to come to her aid. But the Texans were always barring his way, shooting at him and laughing uproariously, as if it were all some great joke.
* * *
The storm wind came running from the east like some giant night animal charging upon Jacob. He awoke with a jerk and sat up to stare into the wind. He could see nothing, for all around him the night lay congealed in utter blackness, so thick that a man could hold a handful. The grass stems whipped and broke with a brittle sound. Darts of their reedy bodies stung Jacob’s face like biting insects.
He rolled himself back into his blanket. He hoped the stakes would hold the tethered horses so they wouldn’t drift away with the winds. He lay listening to the storm wind punishing the prairie with its anger.
At last Jacob dozed. At times the wind pushing against the blanket brought pleasant dreams of Petra’s body moving against him when they slept. He would awaken and realize with sadness that he was not with Petra in the big hacienda on the Rio Pecos.
With the dawn the fury of the storm increased and drove Jacob from his bed. The air was full of dust and flying bits of grass. Overhead, dense, threatening clouds streamed past in the teeth of the wind.
The thousands of sheep and the few hundred cows had vanished. Three of the horses were missing. The animals had gone off to the west, and Jacob thought that their situation wasn’t too bad. They could easily end their wind-propelled journey back on the Pecos. Permanent water could be found there.
High Walking came out of the grass. He paid no attention to Jacob, as if the white man did not exist. He saddled one of the horses but touched not one item of the provisions.
You are a damn fool Comanche, thought Jacob. He hastily shoved his blanket into the pack he had assembled the evening before. One of the horses that had marks on its back from having previously carried packs was again loaded. The long-legged horse was saddled. The others were turned loose and immediately began to wander off with the wind.
Jacob dipped out a plate of the cold stew. As he wolfed the food he looked at the Indian, a gaunt, brown statue sitting motionlessly on his horse and staring east into the storm. Jacob wondered what the Indian ate. Or if he ate anything except the peyote.
Jacob swung astride his new mount. The horse immediately grabbed the bit in its big teeth and went stiff-legged. Jacob saw the cruelty at the mouth, and he had no time to fool with the brute. He jerked its head roughly to the side and slapped the horse hard across the ears with his hand. The brute stomped the ground with both front feet and acted as if it wanted to rear. Jacob cuffed it again. The horse relaxed and accepted the domination of its rider. It went off smartly beside High Walking’s mount.
Beyond the trampled zone of the prairie where the sheep had grazed and bedded, Jacob and High Walking found the tracks of four horses. They stepped down from their saddles and squatted in the whipping grass to examine the imprints in the dirt.
“The riders are ahead of us, maybe two days,” High Walking said, and touched one of the horse tracks.
“The gunmen who escaped from us at the river warned the men with the herd. Now the leader and three others ride on ahead. They’ll be alert and watching for us.”
“That makes no difference to me,” growled the Comanche.
The men mounted and guided their cayuses to the east. The storm wind pounded them as it rushed past in a roaring, invisible river. The mighty current often staggered the horses, and they would slow and try to turn from its bite. Each time the horses faltered, the men whipped them onward with cutting blows.