"Let's go, boys-Buffalo Hump will be halfway to the Brazos by now," Bigfoot said.

Call had been assigned a new mount that day. As yet he had barely touched him, but in a minute he was in the saddle. The little horse, a bay, jumped straight up, nearly throwing him; after that one jump, he didn't buck again. Call only had time to grab his rifle and ammunition pouch. Shadrach had already left. Long Bill, RipGreen, and Jimmy Tweed were scrambling to get mounted. Bigfoot was the only calm man in camp. He reached down without dismounting and grabbed a piece of bacon someone had brought in, stuffing it quickly into his saddlebag.

"It's a passel of stuff to pack up," Johnny Carthage said again, looking at the litter of blankets, cook pots, and miscellaneous gear scattered around him.

"Oh, hush your yapping," Bigfoot said.

Blackie Slidell came racing up-he had had his shirt off, helping to load a wagon, and was so fearful of being left that he had put it back on, wrong side out, as he rode.

Call looked down at Gus-he was still prone, but not so angry.

"I have no idea what you're riled about," he said. "I guess I'll see you up the trail."

"Good-bye," Gus said, suddenly sorry for his angry behaviour. Before he could say more, Bigfoot wheeled his horse and loped off after Shadrach; the Rangers, still assembling themselves, followed as closely as they could.

Gus felt a sudden longing to be with them, though he knew it was impossible. Tears came to his eyes, as he watched his companions lope away. It would be lonely with no one but the cranky Johnny Carthage to talk to all night.

In a minute or two, though, he felt better. His ankle still felt full of needles, but Clara Forsythe had said she would come and rub more liniment on his sore ankle, if the expedition didn't depart too early. All he had to do was get through the night, and he would see her again.

What made him feel even better was that this time he would have Clara all to himself. Call was gone. The thought cheered him so that within ten minutes he was pestering Johnny to go buy them a fresh jug of whiskey from the Mexican peddler.

"I can't be getting too drunk, I got all this packing to do," Johnny protested, but Gus shrugged his protest off.

"You just buy the whiskey," he instructed. "I'll do the getting drunk."

A STORM BLEW UP during the night, with slashing rain and wind and thunder. Shadrach and Bigfoot paid the weather no attention- they set a fast pace, and didn't stop. In the dark, Call grew fearful of falling behind and being lost. They cut through several clumps of live oak and scrub-he was afraid he and his little bay would fight themselves out of a thicket, only to find themselves alone. He stayed as close to the rump of the horse in front of him as he could. He didn't want to get lost on his first Indian chase. The party consisted of fifteen men, many of whom he didn't know. Call would have thought it would be easy to keep fifteen riders in sight, but he hadn't counted on the difficulties posed by rain and darkness. At times, he couldn't see his own horse's head-he had to proceed on sense, like a night-hunting animal.

It was a relief, when the smoky, foggy dawn came, to see that he was still with the troop. All the men were soaked, streams of water running from their hats or their hair. There was no stopping for breakfast. Shadrach peeled off, and ranged to the north of the troop. He was lost to sight for an hour or more, but when they came to the burned-out farm he was there, examining tracks.

At first, Call saw no victims-he supposed the family had escaped. The cabin had been burned; though a few of the logs still smouldered. The area around the cabin was a litter, most of it muddy now. There were clothes and kitchen goods, broken chairs, a muddy Bible, a few bottles. The corn-shuck mattresses had been ripped open, and the corn shucks scattered in the mud.

Bigfoot dismounted, and stepped inside the shell of the cabin for a moment-then he stepped out.

"Where are they?" he asked Shadrach, who looked up briefly and pointed to the nearby cornfield.

"Call, gather up them wet sheets," Bigfoot said. Several muddy sheets were amid the litter.

"Why?" Call asked, puzzled.

"To wrap them in-why else?" Bigfoot said, swinging back on his horse.

The woman lay between two corn rows, six arrows in her chest, her belly ripped up. The man had been hacked down near a little rock fence-when they ripped his scalp off, a long tear of skin had come loose with the scalp, running down the man's back. A boy of about ten had three arrows in him, and had had his head smashed in with a large rock. A younger boy, six or seven maybe, had a big wound in his back.

"Lanced him," Bigfoot said. "I thought there was a young girl here."

"They took her," Shadrach informed him. "They took the mule, too. I expect that's what she's riding."

Call felt trembly, but he didn't throw up. He noticed Bigfoot and Shadrach watching him, from the edge of the cornfield. Though they had all expected carnage, most of them had not been prepared for the swollen, ripped-open bodies-the smashed head, the torn stomach.

"Roll them in the sheets, best you can," Bigfoot told him. "When you get to the woman, just break them arrows off. They're in too deep to pull out."

Shadrach walked over and squatted by the dead woman for a moment-he seemed to be studying the arrows. Then he tugged gently at an arrow in the center of the woman's breastbone.

"This one's gone clean through, into the ground," he said. "This is Buffalo Hump's arrow."

"How do you know that?" Call asked.

Shadrach showed him the feathers at the end of the arrow.

"Them's from a prairie chicken," he said. "He always feathers his arrows with prairie chicken. He stood over her and shot that arrow clean through her breastbone."

Bigfoot came over and looked at the arrow, too. The woman's body didn't budge. It was as if it were nailed to the ground. It was a small, skinny arrow, the shaft a little bent. Call tried to imagine the force it would take to send a thin piece of wood through a woman's body and into the dirt. Several of the new men came over and stood in silence near the body of the woman. One or two of them glanced at the body briefly, then walked away. Several of them gripped their weapons so hard their knuckles were white. Call remembered that it had been that way beyond the Pecos-men squeezing their guns so hard their knuckles turned white. They were scared: they had ridden out of Austin into a world where the rules were not white rules, where torture and mutilation awaited the weak and the unwary, the slow, the young.

Bigfoot rode off with Shadrach to study the trail, leaving Call to wrap the four bodies in the muddy sheets. From the center of the cornfield the little cabin, now just a shell, its logs still smouldering, seemed small and sad to Call. The little family had built it, with much labor, in the clearing, sheltered in it, worked and planted their crops. Then, in an hour or less, it was all destroyed: four of them dead, one girl captured, the cabin burnt. Even the milk cow was dead, shot full of arrows. The cow was bloated now, its legs sticking up in the air.

Call did his best with the bodies, but when it came to the woman, he had to ask Blackie Slidell for help. Blackie had to take her feet and Call her arms before they could pull her free, so deep was Buffalo Hump's arrow in the ground. Call had butchered several goats and a sheep or two, when he worked for Jesus-the woman he was trying to wrap in a wet, mouldy sheet had been butchered, just like a sheep.

"Lord, I hope we can whip 'em if we catch up to them," Blackie said, in a shaky voice. "I don't want one of them devils catching me."

Long Bill came over and helped Call with the graves. "I'll help- I'd rather be working than thinking," he said.

They scooped out four shallow graves, rolled the bodies in them, and covered them with rocks from the little rock fence the family had been building.

"They won't need no fence now," Rip Green observed. "All that work, and now they're dead."

Before they had quite finished the burying, Bigfoot and Shadrach came loping back. Bigfoot had the body of a dead girl across his horse.

"Here's the last one-bury her," Bigfoot said, easing the body down to Call. "The mule went lame a few miles from here. I guess they didn't have no horse to spare for this girl. They brained her and shot the mule."

A little later, as the troop was riding north, they passed the dead mule. A big piece had been cut out of its haunch.

"Shadrach done that," Bigfoot said. "He says the game's poorly this year, and it was a fat mule."

They rode north all day, into a broken country of limestone hills. It rained intermittently, the clouds low. In the distance, some of the clouds rested on the low hills, like caps. Now and again Shadrach or Bigfoot rode off in one direction or another, but never for long. In the afternoon, they stopped and cooked the mule meat. Shadrach cut the haunch into little strips and gave each man one, to cook as preferred. Call stuck his on a stick and held it over the fire until it was black. He had never planned to eat mule and didn't expect to like the taste, but to his surprise the meat was succulent-it tasted fine.

"When will we catch 'em?" he asked Bigfoot at one point. They had not seen a trace of the Comanches-yet for all he knew, they were close, in one of the rocky valleys between the hills. Several times, as they rode north, he kept his eyes to the ground, trying to make out the track that the troop was following. But all he saw was the ground. He would have liked to know what clues the two scouts picked up to guide the chase, but no one offered to inform him. He was reluctant to ask-it made him seem too ignorant. But in fact he was ignorant, and not happy about it. At least Shadrach had taught him how to identify Buffalo Hump's arrow-he thought he could recognize the feathers again, if he saw them. That was the only piece of instruction to come his way, though.

When he asked Bigfoot when he thought they would catch up with the Comanches, Bigfoot looked thoughtful for a moment.

"We won't catch them," he said.

Call was puzzled. If the Rangers weren't going to catch the enemy, why were they pursuing them at all?

Bigfoot's manner did not invite more questions. He had been eager, back on the Rio Grande, to talk about the finer points of suicide, but when it came to their pursuit of the Comanche raiding party, he was not forthcoming. Call rode on in silence for a few miles, and then tried again.

"If we ain't going to catch them, why are we chasing them?" he asked.