"You're right," he said. "We got horse meat, and it's already cooked. That's good, since we lost our cook."

He looked at the weary troop and smiled.

"It's every man for himself now, boys," he said. "Carve off what you can carry, and let's proceed."

Call carved off a sizable chunk of haunch-not from his bay, but from another horse. Gus whittled a little on a gelding's rump, but it was clear his heart was not in the enterprise.

"You better do what the Colonel said," Call said. "You'll be begging for mine, in a day or two."

"I don't expect I will," Gus said. "I've still got my mind on a deer."

"What makes you think you could hit a deer, if you saw one?" Call asked. "It's open out here. A deer could see you before you got anywhere near gunshot range."

"You worry too much," Gus said. At the moment, meat was not what was on his mind. Caleb Cobb's treachery in denying him the promotion was what was on his mind. He had gone over the edge of the canyon and taken the risk. Suppose his belt had slipped off, like the dog's collar? He would be dead, and all for a dog's sake. It was poor commanding, in Gus's view. He had been the only man who volunteered-he ought to have been promoted on that score alone. He had been proud to be a corporal, for awhile, but now it seemed a petty title, considering the hardship that was involved.

While he was thinking of the hardship, an awful thought occurred to him. They were now on the open plain, walking through waist-high grass. The canyon was already several miles behind them.

But where the Comanches were, no one knew. The Indians could be drawing a circle around them, even as they walked. If they fired the grass again, there would be no canyon to hide them. They had no horses, and even horses had not been able to outrun the fire.

"What if they set another fire, Woodrow?" Gus asked. "We'd be fried like that jackrabbit you're carrying."Call walked on. What Gus had just said was obviously true. If the Indians fired the grass again they would all be killed. That was such a plain fact that he didn't see any need to talk about it. Gus would do better to be thinking about grub, or water-holes, it seemed to him.

"Don't it even worry you?" Gus asked.

"You think too much," Call said. "You think about the wrong things, too. I thought you wanted to be a Ranger, until you met that girl. Now I guess you'd rather be in the dry goods business."

Gus was irritated by his friend's curious way of thinking.

"I wasn't thinking about no girl," he informed Call. "I was thinking about being burned up."

"Rangering means you can die any day," Call pointed out. "If you don't want to risk it, you ought to quit."

Just as he said it an antelope bounded up out of the tall grass, right in front of them. Gus had been carrying his rifle over one shoulder, barrel forward, stock back. By the time he got his gun to his shoulder, the antelope was an astonishing distance away. Gus shot, but the antelope kept running. Call raised his gun, only to find that Gus was right between him and the fleeing animal. By the time he stepped to the side and took aim the antelope was so far away that he didn't shoot. Shadrach, who had seen the whole thing, was annoyed.

"You didn't need to shoot it, you could have hit it over the head with your gun," he said.

"Well, it moved quick," Gus said, lamely. Who would expect an antelope to move slow? The whole troop was looking at him, as if it was entirely his fault that a tasty beast had escaped.

The incident brought Bigfoot to life, though-and Shadrach, too. The old man had entrusted his rifle to Matilda, but he got it back.

"That little buck was just half grown," Bigfoot said. "I doubt it will run more than a mile. Maybe if we ease along we can kill it yet." "Maybe," Shadrach said. "Let's go."

The two scouts left together-Caleb Cobb had been walking so far ahead that he was unaware of the incident until he decided it was time to make a dry camp for the night. He had heard the shot and supposed someone had surprised some game. When he got back and discovered that both his scouts were gone in pursuit of an antelope, he was not pleased.

"Both of them went, after one little buck?" he asked. "Now, that was foolish, particularly when we got all this good horse meat to nibble on."

Night fell and deepened, the sunset dying slowly along the wide western horizon. Matilda Roberts was pacing nervously. She blamed herself for not having tried harder to discourage Shadrach from going after the antelope. Bigfoot was younger-he could have tracked the antelope alone.

By midnight the whole camp had given up on the scouts. Matilda could not stop sobbing. Memory of Indians was on everybody's mind. The two men could be enduring fierce tortures even then. Gus thought of the missed shot, time after time. If he only hadn't had his rifle over his shoulder, he could have hit the antelope. But all his remembering didn't help. The antelope was gone, and so were the scouts.

"Maybe they just camped and went to sleep," Long Bill suggested. "It's hard enough to find your way on this dern plain in the daylight. How could anyone do it at night?"

"Shadrach ain't never been lost, night or day," Matilda said. "He can find his way anywhere. He'd be here, if he wasn't dead."

Then she broke down again.

"He's dead-he's dead, I know it," she said. "That goddamn hump man got him."

"If he wasn't dead, I'd shoot him, or Wallace one," Caleb said. "I lost my dog and both my scouts in the same day. Why it would take two scouts to track one antelope buck is a conundrum."

"Say that again-a what?" Long Bill asked. Brognoli sat beside him, his head still jerking, his look still glassy eyed. In the moments when his head stopped jerking, it was twisted at an odd angle on his neck.

"A conundrum," Caleb repeated. "I visited Harvard College once and happened to learn the word."

"What does it mean, sir?" Call asked.

' "I believe it's Latin," Gus said. One of his sisters had given him a Latin lesson, in the afternoon once, and he was anxious to impress Caleb Cobb with his mental powers-perhaps he'd make sergeant yet.

"Oh, are you a scholar, Mr. McCrae?" Caleb asked.

"No, but I still believe it's Latin-I've had lessons," Gus said. The lessons part was a lie. After one lesson of thirty minutes duration he had given up the Latin language forever.

"Well, I heard it in Boston, and Boston ain't very Latin," Caleb said. "Conundrum is a thing you can't figure out. What I can't figure out is why two scouts would go after one antelope."

"Two's better than one, out here," Long Bill said. "I wouldn't want to go walking off without somebody with me who knew the way back."

"If Shad ain't dead, he's left," Matilda said. "He was talking about leaving anyway."

"Left to do what?" Caleb asked. "We're on the Staked Plains. All there is to do is wander."

"Left, just left," Matilda said. "I guess he didn't want to take me with him."

Then Matilda broke down. She sobbed deeply for awhile, and then her sobs turned to howls. Her whole body shook and she howled and howled, as if she were trying to howl up her guts. In the emptiness of the prairies the howls seemed to hover in the air. They made the men uneasy-it was as if a great she-wolf were howling, only the she-wolf was in their midst. No one could understand it. Shadrach had gone off to kill an antelope buck, and Matilda was howling-a woman abandoned.

Many of the men shifted a little, wishing the woman would just be quiet. She was a whore. No one had asked her to form an attachment to old Shadrach anyway. He was a mountain man-mountain men were born to wander.

Several men had been hoping Matilda would become a whore again-they had a long walk ahead, and a little coupling would at least be a diversion. But hearing her howl, the same men, Long Bill among them, began to have second thoughts. The woman was howling like a beast, and a frightening beast at that. Coupling with her would be risky. Besides, old Shadrach might not be gone. He might return at an inconvenient time and take offense.

Caleb Cobb was unaffected by Matilda's howling. He was eating a piece of horse meat-he glanced at Matilda from time to time. It amused him that the troop had become so uneasy, just because a woman was crying. Love, with all its mystery, had arrived in their midst, and they didn't like it. A whore had fallen in love with an old man of the mountains. It wasn't supposed to happen, but it had.

The men were unnerved by it-such a thing was unnecessary, even unnatural. Even the Comanches, in a way, worried them less. Comanches did what they were expected to, which was kill whites. It might mean war to the death, but at least there was no uncertainty about what to expect. But here was a woman howling like a she-wolf-what sense did that make?

"Love's a terrible price to pay for company, ain't it, Matty?" Caleb said. "I won't pay it, myself. I'd rather do without the company."

One by one, the exhausted men fell asleep. Gus wanted to play cards; there was rarely a night when the urge for cardplaying didn't come over him. But the men ignored him. They didn't want to play cards when they had nothing to play for, and were thirsty anyway. It was pointless to play cards when Buffalo Hump and his warriors might be about to hurl down on them, and Johnny Carthage said as much.

"Well, they ain't here now, why can't we play a few hands?" Gus asked, annoyed that his friends were such sleepyheads.

The men didn't even answer. They just ignored him. For awhile, once Matty's howls subsided, the only sound in camp was the sound of shuffling cards-Gus shuffled and shuffled the deck, to keep his hands busy.