“You kilt one—what was it like?” Gus asked, trying to act normal and not reveal his acute discomfort at the fact of his friend’s sudden success.

“He was almost on me—I shot just in time,” Call said. “As soon as your ankle heals proper I expect we’ll have another engagement. Once you kill a Comanche the Colonel will promote you, too, and we can be corporals together.”

He wanted to do what he could to lighten the blow to his friend.

“If I don’t, then one will kill me and that will be the end of things,” Gus said, still feeling weak. “I just hope I don’t get scalped while I’m alive, like Ezekiel done.”

“Why, you won’t get killed,” Call said, alarmed at his friend’s sudden despondency. Gus possessed plenty of fight, but somehow that willful girl in the general store had deprived him of it. All he could think about was that girl—it was not good. You couldn’t be thinking about girls in general stores, when you were out in Indian country and needed to be alert.

With Call’s help, Gus at least managed to get saddled and mounted on the shorter of the two horses that had been assigned him. The two young Rangers rode side by side all day, at a lazy pace, while the wagons and oxcarts toiled up the low hills and across the valleys. Call told the story of the chase, and the fight by the river, but he couldn’t tell that his friend was particularly interested.

He held his tongue, though. At least Gus was in the saddle. Once they got across the Brazos, farther from the girl, he might eventually forget her and enjoy the rangering more.

In the afternoon of the third day they glimpsed a fold of the Brazos, curving between two hills, to the west. The falling sun brightened the brown water. To the east they couldn’t see the river at all, but gradually the Rangers at the head of the expedition, who included Gus and Call, heard a sound they couldn’t identify. It wasakin to the sound a cow might make, splashing through a river, only multiplied thousands of times, as if someone were churning the river with a giant churn.

Captain Falconer was at the very front of the troop, on his pacing black. When he heard the sound like water churning, he drew rein. Just as he did the Colonel’s big Irish dog shot past him, braying. His ears were laid back—in a second he was out of sight in the scrubby valley, but not out of earshot.

“It’s buf,” Shadrach said, pulling his rifle from its long sheath.

Just then, two riders came racing from the east. One of the rider’s horses almost jumped the Irish dog, which was racing in sight again. Then it raced away, braying loudly.

“Bes-Das has seen ‘em,” Shadrach said.

Bes-Das was a Pawnee scout—he ranged so far ahead that many of the Rangers had scarcely seen him. The other rider was Alchise, a Mexican who was thought to be half Apache. Both were highly excited by what they had seen behind the eastern hills. Colonel Cobb came galloping up to meet the two scouts; soon the three wheeled their horses and went flying after the dog. The horses threw up their heads and snorted. The excitement that had taken the troop when they thought they were racing to kill mountain goats seized them again—soon forty riders were flying after the Colonel, the Irish dog, and the two scouts.

As the horses fled down the hill, Gus clung tightly to his saddle horn. He could put a little weight on his wounded ankle, but not enough to secure a stirrup when racing downhill over such rocky terrain at such a pace. He knew that if he fell and injured himself further he would be sent home to Austin—all hope of securing promotion and matching his friend Call would be lost.

The sight they saw when they topped the next hill and drew rein with the troop was one neither Call nor Gus would ever forget. Neither of them, until that moment, had ever seen a buffalo, though on the march to the Pecos they had seen the bones of several, and the skulls of one or two. There below them, where the Brazos cut a wide valley, was a column of buffalo that seemed to Gus and Call to be at least a mile wide. To the south, approaching the river, there seemed to be an endless herd of buffalo moving through the hills and valleys. Thousands had already crossed the river and were plodding on to the north, through a little pass in the hills. So thick were the buffalo bunched, as they crossed the river, that it would have been possible to use them as a bridge.

“Look at them!” Gus said. “Look at them buffalo! How many are there, do you reckon?”

“I could never reckon no number that high,” Call admitted. “It’s more than I could count if I counted for a year.”

“This is the southern herd,” Captain Falconer commented— even he was too awed by the sight of the thousands of buffalo, browner than the brown water, to condescend to the young Rangers. “I expect it’s at least a million. They say it takes two days to ride past the herd, even if you trot.”

Bes-Das came trotting back to where Captain Falconer sat. He said something Call couldn’t hear, and pointed, not at the buffalo, but at a ridge across the valley some two miles away.

“It’s him!” Gus said with a gasp, grabbing his pistol. “It’s Buffalo Hump. He’s got three scalps on his lance.”

Call looked and saw a party of Indians on the far ridge, eight in all. He could see Buffalo Hump’s spotted pony and tell that the man was large, but he could not see scalps on his lance. He felt a little envious of his friend’s eyesight, which was clearly keener than his.

“Are those the bucks that whipped you?” Caleb Cobb asked, loping up to Bigfoot.

Bes-Das, a short man with greasy hair and broken teeth, began to talk to the Colonel in Pawnee. Cobb listened and shook his head.

“No, we’d have to ford this damn buffalo herd to go after them,” he said. “I doubt many of these boys could resist shooting buffalo instead of Comanches. By the time we got to the Indians we’d be out of ammunition and we’d probably get slaughtered. Anyway, I doubt they’d sit there and wait for us to arrive, slow as we are.”

“Can’t we shoot some buffalo, Colonel?” Falconer asked. “We’d have meat for awhile.”

“No, wait till we cross this river,” Caleb said. “Half these wagons will probably sink, anyway—if we load them with buffalo roasts we’ll just end up feeding buffalo roasts to the turtles.”

Call was surprised at the Indians. Why did they just sit there, with a force more than one hundred strong advancing toward them? The scalps on the lance were probably those of Rip Green, Longen, and the man called Bert. Did the red men think so little of the whites’fighting ability that they didn’t feel they had to retreat, even when outnumbered by a huge margin?

Slowly, more and more of the riders and wagoneers came up to the ridge and sat watching the buffalo herd. A few of the young men wanted to charge down and start killing buffalo, but Colonel Cobb issued a sharp command and they all stayed where they were.

Shadrach and Bigfoot stood apart, talking to the scouts Bes-Das and Alchise. They were watching the Comanches, who sat on the opposite hill as the great brown herd surged across the Brazos. Below them the Irish dog was barking and leaping at the buffalo, but the buffalo paid him no attention. Now and then he could see the dog nip at the heels of a straggling cow, but the cow would merely kick at him or make a short feint before trotting on with the herd.

“It’s way too many buffalo for old Jeb,” Caleb said, smiling at the sight of his dog’s frustration. “One at a time he can get their attention, but right now they don’t think no more of him than a gnat.”

Then he pulled a spyglass out of his saddlebag and put it to his eye. He studied the Comanches for awhile, and something that he saw gave him a start.

“Kicking Wolf is there,” he said, turning to Falconer as if he were delivering an important piece of news. Call remembered that he had heard the name before—someone, Bigfoot maybe, had suspected that it was Kicking Wolf who had shot the Major’s runaway horse, on the first march west.