The women and boys were eventually ransomed back. Though this was by no means the first time the Comanches took females for slaves, the tale of just what those two suffered came to stand for hundreds; and the Texas Rangers rode with vengeance in their hearts.
Cynthia Anne fared better. Capriciously adopted, raised as a girl of the Nennernuh, she forgot English, forgot wellnigh everything of her early childhood, became an Antelope and presently a mother. By all accounts, hers was a happy marriage; Peta Nawkonee loved his wife and wanted no woman after he lost her. That was in 1860, when Sul Ross led a Ranger expedition in retaliation for a raid and fell . upon the Comanche camp. Its men were off hunting. The Texans shot what women and children fled too slowly, and a Mexican slave whom Ross believed to be the chief himself. Barely in time, a man saw, through dirt and dung-grease, that the hair of one squaw was golden.
The Parker clan and the state of Texas did everything they could for her. It was no use. She was Naduah, who only yearned back to the prairie and the People. Repeated _ attempts to escape finally forced her kinfolk to keep a guard on her. When disease robbed her of her daughter, she howled, tore and slashed her own flesh, sank into silence and starved herself to death.
Out on the plains, her younger son perished as wretchedly. Sickness dwelt always among the Indians, tuberculosis, arthritis, worms, ophthalmia, the smallpox that Europeans brought, a litany of ills without end. But her older son flourished, gathered a war band, became headman of the Antelopes. He refused to sign the Medicine Lodge treaty that would put the tribeson a reservation. Instead, he carried terror along the frontier. He was Quanah.
“Have you seen their graves?” he asked levelly.
“I have not,” Tarrant said, “but if you wish, I can visit and tell them of your love.”
Quanah smoked for a while longer. At least he didn’t outright call the white man a liar. Finally: “Why have you sought me?”
Tarrant’s pulse quickened. “It is not you, chief, great though your fame be. Word has come to me of somebody in your following. If I have heard aright, he hails from the north and has traveled widely and long. Yes, very long, longer than anybody knows, though he never seems to grow old. His must be a strange power. On your home grounds, uh, Nermernuh who stayed behind told us that he came along on this faring. My desire is to speak with him.”
“Why?” demanded Quanah. The bluntness, unlike an Indian, betokened tension below the iron surface.
“I believe he will be glad to talk with me.”
Rufus puffed hard on his cigarette. Laid across his lap, the hook trembled.
Quanah raised his voice to the squaws. One of them left. Quanah returned his look to Tarrant. “I have sent for Dertsahnawyeh. Peregrine.” —the Spanish for the Co-manche name: Wanderer.
“Do you hope he will teach you his medicine?” he went on.
“I have come to find out what it is.”
“I do not think he could tell you, if he were willing, which I do not think he would be.”
Herrera peered at Tarrant. “You only told me you wanted to find out what might lie behind those rumors,” the trader said. “It is dangerous to meddle in warriors’ affairs.”
“Yes, I call myself a scientist,” Tarrant snapped. To Quanah: “That is a man who seeks for whatever truth lies hidden behind things. How do the sun and the stars shine? How did the earth and life come to be? What really happened in the past?”
“I know,” replied the chief. “Thus you whites have found ways to do and make many terrible things, and the railroad runs where the buffalo grazed.” Pause. “Well, I suppose Dertsahnawyeh can take care of himself.” Starkly: “As for me, I must think how to capture yonder house.”
There was nothing more to say.
The tipi entrance darkened. A man trod in. While clad like the rest, he bore no war paint. Nor was he a native of these lands, but tali, slender, lighter-hued. When he saw who sat with Quanah he spoke gently in English. “What do you want of me?”