CAPTAIN BARCROFT GRAVELY RODE UP TO CLOUD, his eyes like flint. “Cloud, I never expected to see you here. In fact, I never thought I’d see you again anywhere.”
Uneasily Cloud said, “I reckon not, sir.”
Barcroft held out his hand. “You’re under arrest, you know. I’ll take your gun.”
Cloud reached for it, then hesitated. “You can have it if you really want it, Captain. But don’t you reckon you’ll need all the guns you can get?”
The captain lowered his hand, his eyes probing at Cloud. “That’s the truth, I will. I’ll want your word—”
“I’ll promise you anything you ask for, Captain,” Cloud said earnestly. “When this is over you can have my guns, do what you want to with me, and I won’t whimper none. But right now I want to take part in whatever the Rifles do about this.” He made a motion with
his hand, toward the ruins of the Moseley home. “I owe it to Lige.”
Barcroft shrugged. “I can’t spare anybody to take you back to the settlement, and I know there are enough Unionists in the outfit see that you got a gun anyway, if you wanted one. So you keep yours, Cloud, for now. Later … we’ll see.” He turned to look over the carnage. His eyes pinched half shut. Cloud saw the man’s jaw ridge. Barcroft asked huskily, “All of them dead?”
Cloud nodded. “All that’s here. The oldest girl, I found her a ways up the trail—dead. There’s a little girl missin’. I reckon them Indians took her along.”
“How old a girl?”
“Three, or thereabouts.”
Barcroft said, almost in a whisper, “Three … like mine.” His hand knotted on the saddlehorn. “I told Moseley,” he gritted. “He wouldn’t listen.” He looked down, face saddened. “They tried to tell me once, and I wouldn’t listen. You’re a frontiersman, Cloud, so you ought to know. What makes a man do it? Why does he stay when the odds are so heavy against him?”
Cloud shook his head. “I can’t rightly say, Captain. All I know is, if it wasn’t for men like Lige—and families like his—we’d still be sittin’ around Plymouth Rock, afraid to go out in the woods.”
The captain nodded grimly. “You’ve said what’s true. All civilization is built over the bones of men like Moseley.”
Cloud said, “Lige believed the Lord intended for white men to have this country. He told me once it was like when God sent the children of Israel into the land of Canaan. Some would die, but the most would make it. Maybe Lige was right; maybe the Lord intended it that way. Maybe He gives men like Lige a divine call, the way He does a preacher.”
The men who had come with Barcroft were scattered about inspecting the ruins. The shock of what they saw held their voices down almost to a whisper and splotched their faces an angry red. There were more men than Cloud had seen ride with the captain before. Most of the regular Rifles were there, as well as a dozen or more civilian volunteers. They led packhorses, well provisioned.
Came ready this time, Cloud thought. Captain must figure to stay on the trail however long it takes to get the job done.
The men began gathering around the captain again. Cloud could sense a grim, smoldering anger in them. They sat their horses or stood on the ground, watching the captain expectantly, impatient to be on the move.
Barcroft picked out a couple of youngsters from among the volunteers, boys still in their late teens. He said, “Lads, I’ve got a job for you. We can’t just leave these poor people this way. They deserve a decent burial. You’d do me a great service if you’d volunteer to stay here and give them one.” When the boys showed hesitancy, he added, “It won’t be an easy job. It’ll take all the manhood you can muster. Will you do it?”
Approached that way, the boys could do little but consent.
Cloud said, “Captain, we ought to get the boys to go along with us a ways and fetch back Samantha Moseley. We can’t just leave her out there.”
The captain nodded. He turned then to the men who gathered around him. “Men,” he said in as grave a voice as Cloud had ever heard him use, “here you see the nature of our enemy. You see why, this time and every time, we need to follow him till we catch him, no matter how hard it is, no matter how long it takes. We need to show him we’re prepared to answer his savagery with a bloody vengeance. This may be a long, hard ride with an awful fight
at the end of it. It could be a costly fight that some of us won’t come home from. But this I swear to you: we won’t turn back till we’ve gotten it done. If there’s anyone here who doesn’t feel he can stay all the way, I want him to leave us right now.”
He looked about him at the hard-set faces. No one spoke or moved. Satisfied, he said, “I thought that’s how it would be. I’ve never been one to brag on men, but I’m proud of you. You’re all sure now? From the time we leave here there’ll be no turning back. If you ride away from here with me, you’ve committed yourselves to stay until it’s finished.”
Some men nodded, some just held still. But none pulled back. “All right, then,” said the captain, “we’ll water our horses, then we’ll ride.” He turned for a glance at Cloud. “Your horse worn out?”
“He’s been a long ways, sir. Reckon if he had to, he’d go some more.”
“Swap with one of the boys on the burial detail. Their horses are fresher. I’m not going to leave you anywhere along the way, Cloud.”
“I have no intention of bein’ left, sir!”
He moved his saddle to one of the boys’ horses and pulled in beside the other men. Seward Prince, who had fought with him over the Union, just gave him a quick glance of dislike. Quade Guffey shook Cloud’s hand gravely, knowing how Cloud felt about the Moseleys.
Barcroft said, “Cloud, you’d just as well take the lead with Miguel.”
“You mean you’d trust me up there, Captain?”
The captain grunted. “Rather have you up there where I can watch you.”
They strung out across the prairie, following the clear trail the Indians had beaten into the sod with their stolen horses. They came to the body of the girl. The men dismounted
silently to stand with hats in their hands. A gray-haired rider who was a part-time preacher bowed his head and spoke a prayer that started with a quiet plea for mercy upon the innocent soul of the girl and ended in an impassioned promise of bloody vengeance.
“She was Thy child, Lord,” he declared, his angry face lifting to the summer sky, “and the hand of the heathen smote her down. But Thou shalt have Thy vengeance! Deliver the heathen into our hands, O Lord, and we will be Thy messengers of judgment!”
Cloud held himself apart from the others. His eyes were squeezed shut, but he could still see the girl in his mind.
Miguel Soto moved over to him and spoke with sympathy, “She was a most pretty girl.”
Conscience-stricken, Cloud only nodded. He couldn’t speak.
She was in love with me, or she thought she was. And all I felt was embarrassment. I wish it could have been different. She deserved a better man than me. She deserved a better fate than this.
Riding away, the captain pulled up beside Cloud. “That’s what they did to one woman. Yet you turned another one over to the Indians.”
Cloud didn’t feel like arguing with the captain. He didn’t feel like talking at all. “It wasn’t the same with Easter, sir; you know that. Besides, I didn’t turn her over to the Indians. She turned herself over.”
“You took her there.”
“It wasn’t my choice. I couldn’t stop her; she was goin’ anyway. I wanted to see she got there alive.”
“How far did you go?”
“A good ways up yonder, sir.”
“Up on those plains? There’s no water up there.”
“There’s water, sir, if you can find it. It’s scarce, and a lot of it’s bad. But it’s there.”
“Could you find that water again?”
Cloud tapped his forehead. “I made maps up here, sir. I could find it.”
The captain chewed his lip a minute, eyes squinting into the northwest. They were calculating eyes, and Cloud could see hope growing in them. At length he turned again to Cloud. “What you did was a hanging offense. Any court-martial would call it desertion in time of war. If I’d found you at another time, another place, I’d have conducted a drumhead court-martial and hanged you in twenty minutes.
“But now, after what we saw at Moseley’s, and that girl back there, what you did doesn’t seem important at all anymore. Maybe we’ll even be able to use some of the knowledge you gained. No telling what we may need to know before we get through this trip.”
They rode without stopping until it was too dark to follow the tracks. The captain ordered a dry camp with no fires. No picket lines were set up for the horses. Each man slept with his horse staked close by him, ready to ride in a moment. Barcroft posted a heavy guard, half expecting the Indians to double back and try for the pursuers’ horses. It had happened before.
But the Comanches didn’t come that night. Next morning the Texans came across the camp where they had halted to rest, pushing on with dawn.
“Bound to know they’re bein’ followed,” Cloud observed to Miguel Soto.
Soto said, “Somebody always follow them this far. But not many times anybody he ever go much farther than this. Most times, we have to turn back when we get about here.”
Miguel added grimly, “I wish now when I live with the Comanche we come this way just one time. Then maybeso I could take the company there—all the way!”
All that day they followed the trail. It began to meander a little, then abruptly straightened again.
Cloud said to Miguel, “They probably figured there wasn’t anybody after them anymore and they got careless awhile. Then one of them scouted back and saw us. They sure yanked up the slack.”
The riders pushed their horses all they dared. It was hard to resist spurring into a hard run and trying to catch up all at once. But every man knew how futile that would be, how disastrous to the horses.
Dusk caught them, and it was difficult to tell whether they had actually made much gain on the Indians or not. Weariness had settled over the men. They didn’t talk as they rode. They just sat slump-shouldered in the saddles and moved doggedly on, hating the colors of fading sunset because this meant they soon had to give up the trail until tomorrow.
Barcroft held up his hand and stopped the men. “We’ll hold here a little while. We all need coffee, I expect, so we’ll stop early enough that we can afford to build fires. Hurry it up. We’ll need to put the fires out again before it turns full dark. Then we’ll ride on a little way farther before we camp.”
Cloud didn’t know how tired he really was until he stepped down and felt his knees buckle. He almost fell.
Soto grinned sympathetically. He appeared to be holding up better. Funny, thought Cloud, how a Mexican so often seemed to have more stamina, always seemed born to the saddle.
“Cloud, my frien’,” said Soto, “you got any coffee?”
Cloud shook his head. “Haven’t hardly got anything, except an appetite.”
Miguel said, “I got plenty. You and me, we share together.”
“Poor trade for you. About all I can give you is gratitude.”
“That,” said Miguel, “is plenty much.”
Engrossed in their coffee, their slim supper, the chance for a few moments of rest, the weary men lost their watchfulness. Barcroft had not posted guard because he didn’t intend to be there long and expected no counterattack. If the Indians came for horses, he had reasoned, they probably would do so after dark.
Therefore the raiding party was almost upon them before anyone saw it. Someone shouted the alarm as the Indians suddenly showed up on a rise and came riding as hard as their horses would run.
The first thought of every man was to grab his own mount and keep the Comanches from getting it. Men jumped away from the fires, spilling coffee, hurling food aside as they grabbed at bridle reins. In seconds the Texas line bristled with guns. But the dozen or so Comanches didn’t try to strike the whole line. They knifed down toward a thin end of it, arrows streaking, guns aflame. Outflanked, most of the Rifles were unable to return effective fire for fear of hitting their own men.
At the very end of the line with Miguel Soto, Cloud grabbed his horse, then dropped to one knee and began to fire at the swift Indian party. He saw Barcroft’s lieutenant, Elkin, go down with an arrow in him. He saw Captain Barcroft run to the man’s side, then pitch forward, hand to his chest.
An Indian whirled around to stab at the captain with a lance. Cloud brought his pistol up and fired. The lance tipped and drove into the ground. The Indian was hurled off his horse by the powerful leverage of it. Jumping to his feet, Cloud let his horse go and sprinted to the captain’s side, pausing to fire again as the downed Indian
struggled to his feet. The Comanche went down to stay.
Another Indian drove at them, but Cloud fired on him and forced him to pull away. He knelt by the captain’s side, the smoking pistol in his hand, his anxious eyes peering through the smoke for signs of another threat.
As suddenly as they had come, the Indians were gone. The smoke drifted away and the dust settled. Cloud turned the captain over and saw the spreading stain on the man’s dusty shirt. He ripped the shirt away to get at the wound. The captain gritted his teeth.
“How many dead, Cloud?” he wanted to know. “How many?”
“Don’t know yet, sir. You just lay still.”
“Dammit, find out how many!”
“Captain, you ain’t in no shape to be worryin’ yourself about it one way or the other.”
He saw Miguel Soto walking up with Cloud’s horse. “Thanks, Miguel,” he said. “Figured I’d lost him.”
“Por nada,” shrugged the Mexican. “I share with you my coffee, but I don’ share with you my horse.”
Cloud found the captain’s wound to be low in the shoulder. “Close, Captain,” he said. “A little lower and it’d have been in the heart.”
“Well,” the captain breathed tightly, “it wasn’t, so let me up. I’ve got to see about the company.”
Cloud shook his head. “Captain, the company’s goin’ to have to do without you, or else turn back. You’ve gone as far as you can go.”
The doctor, Walt Johnson, showed up with his bag. He glanced in dismay at the captain, then forced a thin smile. “They told me you were dead, Captain. No such luck, eh?”
“Patch me up so I can ride!”
“Shape you’re in, Captain,” Johnson said, “you’d be lucky to ride in a wagon.”
“We have no wagon.”
“Sort of narrows it down, doesn’t it, sir?”
The captain seemed to give up then. He sank back, hopelessness in his eyes. “Damn them, what were they after? They knew they couldn’t whip us all. What did they come for?”
Cloud said, “Fun, maybe. Thought they’d hit us a lick and get the hell out. And they probably figured they could get away with some of the horses, too. Been spyin’ on us a spell, more’n likely. Seen us stop for supper and thought they’d bust in and run off all the horses they could. Leave enough of us afoot and there’d be nothin’ left but for all of us to turn back.”
“Did they get many horses?”
“No, sir, not hardly a one.”
“And men … I asked you once about men.”
“Just one dead that I’ve seen, sir.”
Barcroft’s face fell. “Elkin?”
Cloud nodded. “Yes, sir, Elkin. Way he went down, I don’t reckon he hardly felt a thing.”
Barcroft shut his eyes against a surge of pain that stiffened him hard as a rock. When it passed, he opened his eyes again. They were glazed now. He spoke tightly: “Elkin … best man I had. Always figured if anything happened to me … he’d be the one to take over.”
The doctor broke in, “Captain, that bullet’s got to come out, and pretty soon. Longer we wait, the worse it’ll be.”
Barcroft whispered, “Get on with it, then.”
The doctor warned, “It’ll hurt pretty bad. I’ve got some whiskey along—brought it for just such an emergency. Drink enough of that and maybe it won’t seem quite as bad.”
“No whiskey,” Barcroft said flatly. “I can’t be drunk and command.”
“You can’t command now anyway,” said the doctor.
He glanced at Cloud. “Get me some hot water started, will you?”
The doctor went after the whiskey, and Cloud got some water on to boil over a fire. The doctor brought the bottle and handed it to Barcroft. “I’m the doctor,” he said firmly, “and I’m telling you to drink it!”
The captain took a long pull at the bottle and swore at the fire of it. “Where’d you get this?”
“Just drink it … sir!”
Even with the whiskey, the captain fainted before they got the bullet out. He spent a restless night, tossing in fever. By morning, though, the fever had subsided to some extent. The captain’s eyes seemed to be sunk far back into dark hollows. He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t make it.
The doctor told him, “You’ve got to go back, sir, there’s no alternative.”
Barcroft said in a thin, fevered voice, “I vowed we wouldn’t stop this time. I promised to follow the Indians all the way.”
“The company might be able to go on, but you can’t.”
The captain’s pain-ridden eyes studied the worried men gathered around him. At length his gaze settled on Cloud.
“Cloud,” he said, “Likely as not those Indians’d throw you off the trail sooner or later, and you’d have to go by instinct. Could you find the watering places you told me about?”
Cloud frowned and looked at the other men. “I think I could, sir.”
“Thinking isn’t enough. You’ll have to do it.”
Cloud shrugged. “All right, sir, I will find them.”
“Have you ever led men? Commanded them, I mean?”
“Never no bunch like this.”
“You’ll have to do it now. I’m turning the company over to you!”
Cloud rocked back on his heels. “Me, Captain?” He took a deep breath. “Why me?”
“It’s not that I want to, Cloud. If I had a choice, any choice at all …” He scowled. “I’ve watched you. Unionist or not, you know what you’re doing, and you’ve got an advantage over everyone else here. You’ve been up into the edge of the high country where these Indians are heading. It just seems to fall into your lap, doesn’t it?”
“Captain,” Cloud pleaded, “why don’t you turn it over to somebody else? Just let me be a guide—a scout—like I’ve always been. I never figured to be no officer, never had no trainin’ thataway.”
“You know what you need for this job, probably better than any man here. It hurts me worse than it does you, just having to give it to you. So take it and go on. That’s an order!”
Cloud rubbed the back of his neck, still unable to accept what had happened to him. “Captain, I don’t know much about the military, but I thought I was under arrest. You sure don’t turn a command over to a man who’s under arrest.”
Barcroft scowled again. “Then you’re not under arrest anymore. You forget about it and I’ll try to.”
Cloud looked around him, worriedly studying the faces of the men, wondering how they would accept him, especially those strongly Confederate. “Boys,” he said, “I don’t really want this job, and if you-all don’t want to follow me, I won’t take it. It’s up to you.”
The captain protested, “It’s not up to them. I gave the order.”
Miguel Soto grinned thinly and nodded. Red-haired Quade Guffey said, “All right, new captain, you just tell us where you want us to go to.”
Cloud looked at Seward Prince, the staunch Confederate.
Prince frowned and dug his toe into the ground. He finally said, “This ain’t no time to be fightin’ over politics. Them Indians don’t know one side from the other. Later, maybe, I’ll fight you to hell and gone. But right now I’ll follow you.”
Cloud expected some vocal opposition, for he could see it in a few of the faces. But when Prince accepted him, the rest of the opposition seemed to dissolve.
“Just lead out,” somebody spoke, “and let’s go.”
Cloud couldn’t just ride off and leave the captain alone. He had a couple of men who had received slight wounds in the sudden raid last night. These he detailed to take the captain home. An hour’s ride back, he had seen a grove of trees late the day before. He told the men to go there and cut a couple of long ones, then make a travois to carry the captain home.
As Cloud started to leave, the captain waved him over. “Cloud,” he said, “the main thing now is to try to get that little girl back. I don’t expect I’ll ever find mine anymore. But get this one!”
Cloud promised, “We’ll sure try, sir.”