Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

"He made it back to camp." "Yes, and the rascal had a good look at the troop," Scull said. "He knows our numbers --in fact, he reduced our numbers, the damned scamp. He has a Mexican look-- the son of a captive, I expect. Here, gentlemen, I'll share my glass. It's not every day you get to watch Buffalo Hump at breakfast." It's not every day I'd want to, Call thought, but he eagerly took the binoculars. It took him a moment to focus them, but when he did he saw the great hump man, Buffalo Hump, a figure of nightmare across the southern plains for longer than he and Augustus had been rangers.

Call's last good look at the man had come twelve years earlier, during an encounter in the trans-Pecos. Now, there he stood. A young wife had spread a buffalo robe for him, but Buffalo Hump declined to sit. He was looking around, scanning the rims of the canyon. As Call watched, Buffalo Hump looked right at him-- or at least at the large rock where they all sat.

"He's looking for us, Captain," Call said. "He just looked right at me." "Let me look," Augustus said. "He almost got me once, the devil. Let me look." Call handed Gus the binoculars--when Augustus trained them on Buffalo Hump, the man was still standing, his head raised, looking in their direction.

"He's older, but he ain't dead, Woodrow," Gus said.

When he handed the binoculars back to Captain Scull he felt his stomach quivering--an old fear unsteadied his mind, and even his hand. His first glimpse of Buffalo Hump, which had occurred in a lightning flash many years before, was the most frightening moment in all his time as a fighting man on the Texas frontier. He had only escaped the hump man that night because of darkness, and because he had run as he had never run, before or since, in his life. Even so, he bore a long scar on one hip, from where Buffalo Hump's lance had struck him.

"Did you see, Woodrow?" he said. "He still carries a big lance, like the one he stuck in me." "Why, you're right, sir," Inish Scull said, studying Buffalo Hump through his binoculars again.

"He does have a lance in his hand. He's devoted to the old weapons, I suppose." "Why not?" Call said. "He come near to wiping out our whole troop the first time we fought him, and he didn't have nothing but a bow and a knife and that lance." "It's practice, you see," Scull said.

"The man's probably practiced with those weapons every day of his life since the age of four." Call had fought the Comanches as hard as any ranger, and yet, when he had looked down at them through Captain Scull's glass, saw the women scraping hides and the young men racing their ponies, he felt the same contradictory itch of admiration he had felt the first time he fought against Buffalo Hump. They were deadly, merciless killers, but they were also the last free Indians on the southern plains. When the last of them had been killed, or their freedom taken from them, their power broken, the plains around him would be a different place. It would be a safer place, of course, but a flavor would have been taken out of it--the flavor of wildness. Of course, it would be a blessing for the settlers, but the settlers weren't the whole story--not quite.

Inish Scull had lowered his binoculars--he had stopped watching the Indians and was staring into space.

"It's the quality of the opponent that makes soldiering a thing worth doing," he said. "It ain't the cause you fight for--the cause is only a cause. Those torturing fiends down there are the best opponents I've ever faced. I mean to kill them to the last man, if I can--but once it's done I'll miss 'em." He sighed, and stood up.

"When we finish this fight I expect it will be time to go whip the damn Southern renegades-- there'll be some mettle tested in that conflict, let me assure you." "Renegades, sir," Call said, a good deal puzzled by the remark. "I thought the Comanches were about the last renegades." Inish Scull smiled and waved a hand.

"I don't mean these poor savages," he said. "I mean the Southern fops who are even now threatening to secede from the Union. There'll be blood spilled from Baltimore to Galveston before that conflict's settled, I'll wager. It's the Southern boys I called "renegades"'--and they are renegades, by God. I'd like to ride south on my good horse, Hector, and kill every rebel fop between Charleston and Mobile." Captain Scull cased his binoculars and looked at the two of them with a mean grin. "Of course, all rebels ain't fops, gentlemen.

There's mettle on both sides, plenty of it.

That's why it will be a terrible war, when it comes." "Maybe it won't come, Captain," Augustus said, with a glance at Call. He was uneasily aware that the Captain was a Yankee, whereas he and Call were Southern. If such a war did come, the Captain and the two of them might find themselves on different sides.

"It will come within five years," Inish Scull said confidently. He stood up, walked to the very edge of the cliff, and spat a great arc of tobacco juice into the canyon.

"It'll be brother against brother, and father against son, when that war comes, gentlemen," he said. He turned and was about to walk to his horse when Augustus saw a movement, at the far south end of the canyon. It was just some moving dots, but there had been no dots there a few minutes earlier, when they had been looking at the Comanche horse herd.

"Captain, look," he said. "I think there's more Indians coming." Inish Scull took out his binoculars and scanned the southern distance with some impatience.

"Damn it, every time I make a sensible plan, something happens to thwart me," he said. "There are more Indians coming. If we tried to spook the horse herd now, we'd be heading right into them." Call looked where the others were looking but could only see a faint, wavy motion.

"Mr. Call, go rouse the men--we better skedaddle," Scull said. "It's old Slow Tree and he's got his whole band with him.

We're but twelve men, and Buffalo Hump knows it. Even if he's not in much of a fighting mood, some of the young men are bound to be excited by an advantage like that." Call knew that was true. It was well enough to look forward to the day when the Comanche would be a broken people, no longer dangerous--but that day was not in sight, and speculation along those lines was premature, in his view. There were now four or five hundred Comanche warriors right below them, a force strong enough to overrun any army the U.S.

government could put in the field. Call could now see a line of Indians, moving up from the south.

There were still the size of ants, but he knew they would sting a lot worse than ants, if it came to a fight.

"Go, Mr. Call--g," Captain Scull said. "Wake up the nappers and get everyone mounted. We're a tempting morsel, sitting up here on the top of this hole. At least we better make ourselves a morsel in motion." When Augustus looked to the south again he saw that the lead warriors had scared up a little pocket of buffalo that had been grazing in a small side canyon. There were only four buffalo, running for their lives, with a wave of warriors in pursuit.

"Those buffalo would have done better to stay hid," he remarked. "They'll soon be harvested now." Inish Scull seemed uninterested in the buffalo.

"I met old Slow Tree once, at a big parley on the Trinity," he said, his binoculars still pointed south. "Quite the diplomat, he is. He'll talk and promise peace, but it's just diplomacy, Mr.

McCrae. It won't help the next settler he encounters, out on the baldies somewhere." He paused and spat.

"I'll take Buffalo Hump over your diplomatic Indians," he said. "Buffalo Hump don't parley--don't believe in it.

He knows the white man's promises are worth no more than Slow Tree's. They're worth nothing, and he knows it. He scorns our parleying and peace-piping and the lot. I admire him for it, though I'd kill him in a second if I could get him in range." Augustus was watching the buffalo chase.