Suddenly it was over. The wild men gathered up their dead and wounded and pulled off again.
In the silence that followed, the clock sounded nearly as loud as—a hammer nailing down a coffin lid. It was a big old grandfather clock, the single treasure from her parents’ home that Susie had wanted carted out here. The dial glimmered through a blue haze. Langford squinted eyes which the powder smoke stung and whistled softly. Just about ten minutes since the attack began. No more, dear God?
Nancy had crawled into a corner. She huddled hugging herself. Her mother went to give whatever comfort she could.
THE WIND across the high plains still bore much winter in it. This range wasn’t as bleak as the Llano Estacado, over which the travelers had come, but the spring rains had not started in earnest and only a bjeath of green touched endless sere grass. Trees—willow or cottonwood clumped by whatever streams ran through these miles, the occasional lonesome oak—reached bare limbs into a bleached sky. Game was plentiful, though. It wasn’t buffalo, except for white bones, the work of white hunters; buffalo were fast getting scarce. However, pronghorn, peccary, jackrabbit ran everywhere, with wolves and cougars to prey on them, while elk, bear, and cougar haunted the canyons. Jack Tarrant’s party hadn’t seen any cattle since well before they left New Mexico. Twice they passed abandoned ranches. The red terror woke to all its old fury while the states were at each other’s throats, and the Army had a lot of quelling yet to do, seven years after Appomattox.
Sunlight dazzled eastward vision. At first Tarrant couldn’t see what Francisco Herrera Carillo pointed at. “Hwno,” the trader said. “No proviene de ningun campamento.” He was ;a pale-brown man with sharp features; even on the trail he kept his chin shaven, mustache trimmed, clothes neat, as if to remind the world that among his forefathers were Con-quistadores.
Tarrant looked a bit like him, given aquiline nose and large, slightly oblique eyes. After a moment he too made out the stain rising athwart heaven. “Not from a camp, when it’s visible from below the horizon,” he agreed slowly in the same Spanish. “What, then? A grass ike?”
“No, that would be wider spread. A building. I think we have found your Indians.”
Burly and redbearded, hook newly strapped on to stick out of his right sleeve, Rufus Bullen stumped over to join them. “Christ!” he growled. Two missing front teeth made his English slightly slurred. If others than Tarrant noticed the new growth that had begun to push stubs through the gums, they had said nothing about it. “You mean they’ve set fire to a ranch?”
“What else?” Herrera replied coolly, holding to his own language. “I have not been hi these parts for some time, but if I remember right and have my bearings, that is the Lang-ford property. Or was.”
“What’ie we waiting for? We can’t let ‘em—“ Rufus broke off. His shoulders sagged. “Inutilis est,” he mumbled.
“We will probably arrive too late, and can certainly do nothing against a war band,” Tarrant reminded him, also in Latin.
Herrera shrugged. He had grown used to the Yanquis dropping into that lingo. (He recognized an occasional word from the Mass, but no more, especially since they spoke it differently from the priests.) This quest of theirs was mad anyway. “You wish to speak with the Comanches, no?” he observed. “You can hardly do that if you fight them. Come, let us eat and be on our way. If we’re lucky, they will not have moved on before we get there.”
His sons Miguel and Pedro, young but trailwise, had wakened at dawn and gotten busy. A coffeepot steamed and two pans sizzled on a grill above a fire of buffalo chips—an abundance of which remained—and mesquite. As hard as. the seekers pushed, without time off to hunt, no bacon was left except fat for cooking, but they kept plenty of corn meal to make tortillas and two days ago the father had had the good luck to knock down a peccary. It had been quite a ways off. Every Comanchero was necessarily a crack shot.