“We don’t know,” Call said. “He left.”

Caleb nodded. “If I were you I’d watch my flank for a few days, Corporal McCrae,” he said. “John Kirker ain’t one to forget a whacking.”

Then he turned, and went into his tent.

Soon the company found its legs and drifted back to normal pursuits: cooking, drinking, standing guard, making fires. Call and Gus, feeling a kinship with Sam because they were all from San Antonio, took shovels arid picks and helped him dig Falconer’s grave.

General Phil Lloyd stood by Caleb Cobb’s tent, feeling forgotten. Falconer, too, was well on his way to being forgotten, though he had only been dead ten minutes. The difference was that Falconer was actually dead, whereas General Lloyd merely felt he might as well be. He had put on his cleanest blue coat, in preparation for Buffalo Hump’s visit. He had even had Peedee, his man, hang all his twelve medals on it. Once he had had as many as eighteen medals—he was pretty sure the correct figure was eighteen—but six of them had been lost, in various drunken outings, in various muddy towns.

Still, twelve medals was no small number of medals; it was an even dozen, in fact. An even dozen medals was a solid number, yet out on the Brazos, with the sky getting cloudy and a gloomy dusk coming on, a dozen medals seemed to count for nothing. Buffalo Hump hadn’t even glanced at him, or his medals, though in his experience, red Indians were usually attracted to military decorations.

Not only that: Caleb Cobb had not bothered to introduce him; nor had he asked him to sit. The buffalo liver had smelled mighty appetizing, but Caleb Cobb hadn’t offered him any.

The two young Rangers, Corporal Call and Corporal McCrae, came over and rolled Captain Falconer’s body onto a wagon sheet. General Lloyd walked over and watched them tie the body into its rough shroud. He had once been the hero of the Battle of New Orleans—Andrew Jackson had made a speech about him. It seemed to him that the two youngsters, just getting their start in military life, might appreciate his history. They might want to hear how it had been, fighting the British—far different, certainly, from fighting savages such as Buffalo Hump. They might want to look at his medals and ask him what this one was for, or what exploit that one celebrated.

“It will be fine to be in Santa Fe—that high air is too good for your lungs,” he said, to put the young men at ease.

“Yes sir,” Gus said. He was wondering whether a salute was necessary, with darkness nearly on them.

Before Call could speak—he had only been planning to say something simple, as Gus had—General Lloyd decided he didn’t want to be around a corpse wrapped in a wagon sheet. He couldn’t get a bad notion out of his head, the notion being that he was really the one who was dead and wrapped in a wagon sheet.

The notion disturbed General Lloyd so much that he turned and stumbled away, to look for his wagon, his servant Peedee, and his bottle. He thought he might send Peedee after a whore.

In New Orleans, in the old days, there had been winsome and willing Creole girls—his hope was that there might be something of the sort in Santa Fe. Santa Fe was high, he knew that much; high air was thought to be good for women’s complexions. In Santa Fe he might find a young beauty to marry him; if he could, then it wouldn’t matter so much about lost medals, or the fact no one took much notice of him at parleys.

At present, though, they had only advanced to the Brazos and the only women around were rough camp whores. He thought he might send Peedee to look for one, though. It might help him sleep.

Gus and Call were trying to keep their minds off Falconer’s abrupt execution. Neither of them had supposed that the military life involved such extreme risks. They were so disturbed by what they had seen that they were having an awkward time getting Falconer’s body wrapped in its rough shroud; neither of them had had much training at burials. When Gus saw General Lloyd stumble away, he grew apprehensive. If the penalty for failing to give a fine rifle to an Indian was instant death, what might the penalty be for failing to salute a general?

“We didn’t salute him. What if he has us hung?” Gus asked. He was troubled by the thought that he might have made a serious breach of military etiquette only a few minutes after having been promoted to corporal.

Call was still trying to puzzle out the logic of Falconer’s execution. Caleb Cobb had brooked almost no argument. Without warning, he had merely yanked out his pistol and shot the Captain dead. Of course, Falconer had balked at an order, but he was a captain. He could hardly have suspected that his refusal to hand over his prized rifle would mean instant execution. If Caleb had put it to him that he viewed the matter as serious—that it meant life or death—no doubt Captain Falconer would have given up the gun. But Caleb hadn’t given a chance to argue. Call would have thought there would have to be some kind of trial, before a captain in the Rangers could be executed. He meant to ask Bigfoot about the matter the next time he saw him.

“I think we could have saluted,” Gus said again. With darkness coming, and a dead man to bury, the omission of the salute loomed large in his mind.

“Hush about it,” Call said. “I don’t even know how to salute. Help me tie this end of the wagon sheet. He’s going to slip out if you don’t.”

RAIN BEGAN AT MIDNIGHT and continued until dawn and then on through the day. Call and Gus crawled under one of the wagons, hoping for a little sleep, but the water soon puddled around them and they slept little. Gus kept remembering the puzzled look on Falconer’s face, when Caleb Cobb raised his gun to kill him. He mentioned it to Call so often that Call finally told him to shut up about it.

“I guess he was puzzled,” he said. “We were all puzzled. You don’t expect to see a man shot down like that, just to please an Indian.”

“I doubt Bigfoot was puzzled,” Gus said. “It takes a lot to puzzle Bigfoot.”

Call was glad when it became their turn to stand guard. Standing guard beat trying to sleep in a puddle.

By midmorning the Brazos was impassable—the rains fell for three days, and then the river only fell enough for a general crossing to be feasible after three more days, by which time morale in the expeditionary party had sunk very low.In the wake of Falconer’s death, men began to remember other tales they had heard, or thought they had heard, about Caleb Cobb’s violent behaviour as a commander. Long Bill Coleman recalled that someone had told him Caleb had once hanged six men at sea, in his pirating days. The men’s crime, as Long Bill remembered it, was to get into the grog and turn up drunk.

“I heard it was four,” Blackie Slidell said.

“Well, that’s still a passel of men to hang because they were drunk,” Long Bill argued.

During the day, hunting parties scoured the south bank of the Brazos, sure that some of the thousands of buffalo they had seen must still be on the south side of the river; their hopes were disappointed. Not a single buffalo could be located, nor were deer or wild pigs easy to find. Caleb ordered the killing of three beeves— but the meat was stringy, and the men’s discontent increased.

“We could have been eating buffalo liver every night,” Johnny Carthage complained. “I’ve heard the hump is good, too.”

“No, the hump is fatty,” Bigfoot said. “I generally take the liver and the tongue.”

That was the first Gus McCrae had heard about people eating tongue.

“Tongue?” he said. “I won’t be eating no tongues—I don’t care if they do come from a buffalo.”

“I’ll take yours, then,” Bigfoot said. “Buffalo tongue beats polecat by a long shot, although polecat ain’t bad if you salt it heavy.”

“What happens in an army if the colonel goes crazy?” Call asked. It seemed to him that Caleb Cobb might be insane. His own promotion, for doing nothing more than defending himself from sure death, had been a whimsy on Caleb’s part—as much a whimsy as Falconer’s execution. During the long rainy nights, huddled around campfires, their pants soaked, the men speculated and speculated about Caleb Cobb’s surprising action.