Читать книгу The Searchers - Alan Le May - Страница 9

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Out in the middle of a vast, flat plain, a day’s ride from anything, lay a little bad-smelling marsh without a name. It covered about ten acres and had cat-tails growing in it. Tules, the Mexicans called the cat-tails; but at that time certain Texans were still fighting shy of Mexican ways. Nowhere around was there a river, or a butte, or any landmark at all, except that nameless marsh. So that was how the “Fight at the Cat-tails” got its foolish-sounding name.

Seven men were still with the pursuit as they approached the Cat-tail fight at sundown of their fifth day. Lije Powers had dropped out on the occasion of his thirty-ninth or fortieth argument over interpretation of sign. He had found a headdress, a rather beautiful thing of polished heifer horns on a browband of black and white beads. They were happy to see it, for it told them that some Indian who still rode was wounded and in bad shape, or he would never have left it behind. But Lije chose to make an issue of his opinion that the headdress was Kiowa, and not Comanche—which made no difference at all, for the two tribes were allied. When they got tired of hearing Lije talk about it, they told him so, and Lije branched off in a huff to visit some Mexican hacienda he knew about somewhere to the south.

They had found many other signs of the punishment the Comanches had taken before the destruction of the Edwards family was complete. More important than other dropped belongings—a beaded pouch, a polished ironwood lance with withered scalps on it—were the shallow stone-piled Indian graves. On each lay the carcass of a horse of the Edwards’ brand, killed in the belief that its spirit would carry the Comanche ghost. They had found seven of these burials. Four in one place, hidden behind a hill, were probably the graves of Indians killed outright at the ranch; three more, strung out at intervals of half a day, told of wounded who had died in the retreat. In war, no Indian band slacked its pace for the dying. Squaws were known to have given birth on the backs of traveling ponies, with no one to wait for them or give help. The cowmen could not hope that the wounded warriors would slow the flight of the murderers in the slightest.

Amos kept the beaded pouch and the heifer-horn headdress in his saddle bags; they might help identify the Comanche killers someday. And for several days he carried the ironwood lance stripped of its trophies. He was using it to probe the depth of the Indian graves, to see if any were shallow enough so that he could open them without falling too far back. Probably he hoped to find something that would give some dead warrior a name, so that someday they might be led to the living by the unwilling dead. Or so Martin supposed at first.

But he could not help seeing that Amos was changing. Or perhaps he was seeing revealed, a little at a time, a change that had come over Amos suddenly upon the night of the disaster. At the start Amos had led them at a horse-killing pace, a full twenty hours of their first twenty-four. That was because of Lucy, of course. Often Comanches cared for and raised captive white children, marrying the girls when they were grown, and taking the boys into their families as brothers. But grown white women were raped unceasingly by every captor in turn until either they died or were “thrown away” to die by the satiated. So the pursuers spent themselves and their horseflesh unsparingly in that first run; yet found no sign, as their ponies failed, that they had gained ground upon the fast-traveling Comanches. After that Amos set the pace cagily at a walk until the horses recovered from that first all-out effort, later at a trot, hour after hour, saving the horses at the expense of the men. Amos rode relaxed now, wasting no motions and no steps. He had the look of a man resigned to follow this trail down the years, as long as he should live.

And then Amos found the body of an Indian not buried in the ground, but protected by stones in a crevice of a sandstone ledge. He got at this one—and took nothing but the scalp. Martin had no idea what Amos believed about life and death; but the Comanches believed that the spirit of a scalped warrior had to wander forever between the winds, denied entrance to the spirit land beyond the sunset. Amos did not keep the scalp, but threw it away on the prairie for the wolves to find.

Another who was showing change was Brad Mathison. He was always the one ranging farthest ahead, the first to start out each morning, the most reluctant to call it a day as the sun went down. His well-grained horses—they had brought four spares and two pack mules—showed it less than Brad himself, who was turning hollow-eyed and losing weight. During the past year Brad had taken to coming over to the Edwardses to set up with Lucy—but only about once every month or two. Martin didn’t believe there had been any overpowering attachment there. But now that Lucy was lost, Brad was becoming more involved with every day that diminished hope.

By the third day some of them must have believed Lucy to be dead; but Brad could not let himself think that. “She’s alive,” he told Martin Pauley. Martin had said nothing either way. “She’s got to be alive, Mart.” And on the fourth day, dropping back to ride beside Mart, “I’ll make it up to her,” he promised himself. “No matter what’s happened to her, no matter what she’s gone through. I’ll make her forget.” He pushed his horse forward again, far into the lead, disregarding Amos’ cussing.

So it was Brad, again, who first sighted the Comanches. Far out in front he brought his horse to the edge of a rimrock cliff; then dropped from the saddle and led his horse back from the edge. And now once more he held his rifle over his head with both hands, signaling “found.”

The others came up on the run. Mart took their horses as they dismounted well back from the edge, but Mose Harper took the leads from Mart’s hands. “I’m an old man,” Mose said. “Whatever’s beyond, I’ve seen it afore—most likely many times. You go on up.”

The cliff was a three-hundred-foot limestone wall, dropping off sheer, as if it might be the shoreline of a vanished sea. The trail of the many Comanche ponies went down this precariously by way of a talus break. Twenty miles off, out in the middle of the flats, lay a patch of haze, shimmering redly in the horizontal light of the sunset. Some of them now remembered the cat-tail marsh that stagnated there, serving as a waterhole. A black line, wavering in the ground heat, showed in front of the marsh haze. That was all there was to see.

“Horses,” Brad said. “That’s horses, there at the water!”

“It’s where they ought to be,” Mart said. A faint reserve, as of disbelief in his luck, made the words come slowly.

“Could be buffler,” Zack Harper said. He was a shag-headed young man, the oldest son of Mose Harper. “Wouldn’t look no different.”

“If there was buffalo there, you’d see the Comanche runnin’ ’em,” Amos stepped on the idea.

“If it’s horses, it’s sure a power of ’em.”

“We’ve been trailin’ a power of ’em.”

They were silent awhile, studying the distant pen scratch upon the world that must be a band of livestock. The light was failing now as the sunset faded.

“We better feed out,” Brad said finally. He was one of the youngest there, and the veteran plainsmen were usually cranky about hearing advice from the young; but lately they seemed to listen to him anyway. “It’ll be dark in an hour and a half. No reason we can’t jump them long before daylight, with any kind of start.”

Ed Newby said, “You right sure you want to jump all them?”

Charlie MacCorry turned to look Ed over. “Just what in hell you think we come here for?”

“They’ll be took unawares,” Amos said. “They’re always took unawares. Ain’t an Indian in the world knows how to keep sentries out once the night goes cold.”

“It ain’t that,” Ed answered. “We can whup them all right. I guess. Only thing ... Comanches are mighty likely to kill any prisoners they’ve got, if they’re jumped hard enough. They’ve done it again and again.”

Mart Pauley chewed a grass blade and watched Amos. Finally Mart said, “There’s another way....”

Amos nodded. “Like Mart says. There’s another way.” Mart Pauley was bewildered to see that Amos looked happy. “I’m talking about their horses. Might be we could set the Comanch’ afoot.”

Silence again. Nobody wanted to say much now without considering a long while before he spoke.

“Might be we can stampede them ponies, and run off all the whole bunch,” Amos went on. “I don’t believe it would make ’em murder anybody—that’s still alive.”

“This thing ain’t going to be too easy,” Ed Newby said.

“No,” Amos agreed. “It ain’t easy. And it ain’t safe. If we did get it done, the Comanch’ should be ready to deal. But I don’t say they’ll deal. In all my life, I ain’t learned but one thing about an Indian: Whatever you know you’d do in his place—he ain’t going to do that. Maybe we’d still have to hunt them Comanches down, by bunches, by twos, by ones.”

Something like a bitter relish in Amos’ tone turned Mart cold. Amos no longer believed they would recover Lucy alive—and wasn’t thinking of Debbie at all.

“Of course,” Charlie MacCorry said, his eyes on a grass blade he was picking to shreds, “you know, could be every last one of them bucks has his best pony on short lead. Right beside him where he lies.”

“That’s right,” Amos said. “That might very well be. And you know what happens then?”

“We lose our hair. And no good done to nobody.”

“That’s right.”

Brad Mathison said, “In God’s name, will you try it, Mr. Edwards?”

“All right.”

Immediately Brad pulled back to feed his horses, and the others followed more slowly. Mart Pauley still lay on the edge of the rimrock after the others had pulled back. He was thinking of the change in Amos. No deadlock now, no hesitation in facing the worst answer there could be. No hope, either, visible in Amos’ mind that they would ever find their beloved people alive. Only that creepy relish he had heard when Amos spoke of killing Comanches.

And thinking of Amos’ face as it was tonight, he remembered it as it was that worst night of the world, when Amos came out of the dark, into the shambles of the Edwards’ kitchen, carrying Martha’s arm clutched against his chest. The mutilation could not be seen when Martha lay in the box they had made for her. Her face looked young, and serene, and her crossed hands were at rest, one only slightly paler than the other. They were worn hands, betraying Martha’s age as her face did not, with little random scars on them. Martha was always hurting her hands. Mart thought, “She wore them out, she hurt them, working for us.”

As he thought that, the key to Amos’ life suddenly became plain. All his uncertainties, his deadlocks with himself, his labors without pay, his perpetual gravitation back to his brother’s ranch—they all fell into line. As he saw what had shaped and twisted Amos’ life, Mart felt shaken up; he had lived with Amos most of his life without ever suspecting the truth. But neither had Henry suspected it—and Martha least of all.

Amos was—had always been—in love with his brother’s wife.