THE WHITE BOY who had fired the pistol at me led me back to the tipi. He pried my fingers loose from their grasp in Holmes’s hair and said things in the Comanche language I could not understand. I nodded, thinking he was telling me that the scalp was not mine to keep, hoping he was saying this, for I did not want it. The boy also nodded, as if we understood each other. He set the scalp aside, and then he cleaned my wounds with a wet cloth and spread salve across the tear in my shoulder and the burn along my leg. I tried to speak with him. “Where are you from? What is your name? How long have you been with the Indians? What do they have planned for me now?” He looked at me strangely and shook his head. If he had ever known my language, he did not know it now.

Before he left the tipi, he set beside me a bladder of water and a bit of food, strips of dried meat and hardtack. I lay back on the bed of buffalo robes. Outside I could hear the movement of the camp: the hooves of horses, the occasional growling fights of dogs, the strange language. The top of the tipi walls glowed red with the fiery slip of the sun and then faded to pink and amber. The flap opened and a young woman stepped in. She nodded to me and built up the fire in the middle of the floor. She saw that I had not eaten the food, and pushed it toward me with the toe of her moccasin, nodding and saying, “Tuhkuh. Tuhkuh.”

Her meaning was clear. “Eat.”

I thought that perhaps the food was poisoned, for even though I had eaten the food offered the night before, and even though the boy who had tended my wounds had been tender with me, and this young woman seemed genuinely concerned, I had seen enough already to believe, now that my fight with Holmes was over, that I was of no value to these people.

She pushed at the food again, and then she sat down on the buffalo robe beside me and picked up the strip of meat. She took a bite out of it, chewed and swallowed, then handed it to me and I took it. She did the same with the hardtack, and I took that too. She nodded and stood, and then reached into a fold in her dress and held out her open palm to me. In it was the little noose. I took it from her, and she nodded again and opened the flap to the tipi and stepped out into the night. I never did get my hat back.

Outside I heard gunfire close by and the squeal of mules. I lay listening, wondering if soldiers had come, and if I would be rescued. Then, just as quickly, the thought crossed my mind that I might be arrested for the death of Holmes. But there were no more gunshots, and I know now that the tribe was slaughtering a few mules in their herd in order to have something to eat.

This was the year of 1868, and there was a shortage of food among the tribes. I did not know this as I ate the food that had been left for me. I then lay back on the buffalo robes and slept. It was still night when I woke.

Someone had tended the fire in the tipi, and it crackled cozily and made shadows on the walls and the smoke drifted up in a twisting column to the vent in the top. Light from a larger fire outside flickered against the upper walls, and against this light huge shadows occasionally loomed and glided as a person outside crossed by.

I felt something in my hand and opened my palm to see the little noose the woman had returned to me. I had no place to put it. The buckskins I had been given to wear had no pockets. Mo’s haversack was gone. I untied the rawhide strip from my neck and strung the little noose next to Chloe’s button. My shoulder, where Holmes had taken his bite of me, throbbed as I did so.

It took some time for me to decide that I should step outside the tipi and meet whatever fate the Indians had in store for me. There seemed to be no escaping it. There was nothing I could do for myself. I had no horse, and no gun. Chloe was dead and I thought that I might as well also be dead. I no longer even cared about showing bravery. I would scream and cry if I wanted, and then, once my breath had left my body, I would scream and cry no longer.

I rose and opened the tipi flap and stepped out into the night. There was a large fire off to my right, and many Indians were gathered around it. I smelt the roasted meat, and in spite of my bravado and determination to die, my stomach growled so loudly that it caused a brave walking by to laugh. He took my arm and led me to the fire and a place was made for me between two men. I was handed a bone full of meat. I took it. I fell into it, gnawing and chewing and swallowing all in one motion. It did not occur to me until later that this was one of Mo’s mules.

The Indian beside me smiled and patted me on the back. They continued their talk. The strange words rose and fell around me. Their language sounded like stars would sound, but also like chunks of lard, and the wind in trees, and arrows zinging through the air. I could make no sense of it.

The white boy who had tended my wounds was across from me, with a group of boys around his age. They chattered and laughed and roughhoused. Among them were two more white boys, and across from me was a white man, and to my right a white woman nursed an infant. Captives. Captives turned savage.

I finished eating and continued to sit there. I wondered if I was still being held. It did not seem like it. I stood and grabbed my crotch, indicating to the man next to me that I needed to go relieve myself. He nodded. The fellow to my other side raised his arm and shooed me away, as if I had no need to explain myself. I walked a little ways off from the firelight and the camp and did my business.

When I turned back they were paying me no attention. They were eating, talking, and laughing. I took a few steps back from them and they ignored me. And a few steps again. I squatted there in the shadows, watching the firelight flicker on their faces, listening to their laughter and conversation.

The moon was full and high. I had no doubt that they could see me if they wanted to. I sat there ten minutes, twenty minutes and still they paid me no mind. The two men I had been sitting between shifted closer to each other, closing the gap where I had once been, and I understood in that moment that I was free to go if I wished. I stood and walked away toward the herd of horses and then I turned to look at them again.

A young woman stood and put more wood on the fire. As she sat back down, the man next to her patted her ass and she giggled.

I turned again to walk away. I faced the moonlight, the walls of the canyon, the vast open plains beyond. I faced the freedom to take my leave and return to my own life, but what was that life? Chloe was dead having never known freedom. Mo and Sedge also dead. I had traveled around Texas, and I had seen what white men were still doing to black men. Even if I made it out of Texas alive, what lay beyond it? I turned again and looked at the people gathered around the fire, the families, the children, the women, the men, the elders, the village. I did not know what sort of life I could make in the white world, and I would never know, for that night I wheeled away from it and walked back toward the fire. As I came up two men moved aside, not the two I had sat between before, but two others making a space for me, and I sat down and in this way I joined the Comanche Indians.

You will want to know, I am sure, what I thought lay ahead. It is not as though I reasoned it through while sitting in the canyon in the moonlight, watching my captors around the fire dine on Mo’s slaughtered mule. Nor did I know what would be expected of me should I become part of the tribe. But this seemed to be what was being offered and I took it.

I have thought about it quite a bit since, and I believe that what I felt at that moment might have been akin to power, or at least to the potential of power, and this was not something I had ever felt at any other time in my life.

Perhaps I had enjoyed killing Holmes more than I have admitted to you. He was, after all, Master Wilson’s loyal underling, and for that, did he not deserve to die? It felt good to hold his scalp in my hand, to wrap my fingers into his hair, to let his blood drip onto my leggings.

I cannot say for certain what the tribe saw in me, but they needed warriors. They needed brave men, and I had shown this quality. But a brave man must also be a man willing to help protect the tribe, a man willing to hunt and bring home the buffalo, a man willing to fight the soldiers, a man willing to raid the settlements, to steal horses and cattle and mules, to kill white men, to kidnap women and children. A man who would not mind running a knife around the skull of another human being and popping his scalp off. I became such a man as this.