“He had to make a show for Buffalo Hump,” Bigfoot contended. “He wanted him to know he had sand. Once an Indian thinks you don’t have sand, he don’t show no mercy.”

“That one don’t show no mercy, sand or not,” Long Bill said. “Zeke Moody had plenty of sand, and so did Josh.”

“Maybe Falconer tried to steal his girl, or beat him at cards or something,” Blackie suggested. “Caleb might have had a grudge.“Call couldn’t see that it mattered why—not now. In his view, the killing had not been done properly, but he was young and he didn’t voice his opinion. Captain Falconer had been an officer. If there were charges against him he should have been informed of them, at least. But the only message he got was the bullet that killed him. Probably Caleb Cobb would have been just as quick to kill any man who happened to be standing there at that time. Probably Bigfoot was right: Caleb had just wanted to show Buffalo Hump that a colonel in the Rangers could be as cruel as any warchief, dealing out death as he chose.

Call resolved to do his duties as best he could, but he meant to avoid Caleb Cobb whenever possible. He thought the man was insane, though Gus disagreed.

“Killing somebody don’t mean you’re insane,” he argued.

“I think he’s insane, you can think what you like,” Call told him. “It was Falconer made you a corporal, remember. The Colonel might decide he don’t like you, for no better reason than that.”

Gus thought the matter over, and decided there could be some truth in it. Yet, unlike Call, he was drawn to Caleb Cobb. It interested him that a pirate had got to be commander of an army. Whenever he happened to be around the Colonel, he listened carefully.

On the sixth day, the Colonel decided to cross the river, though it was still dangerously high. Every night his forces diminished— men slipped off, back toward Austin. They decided they had no stomach for prairie travel, and they left. Caleb didn’t have them pursued—half the troop had no idea why they were bound for Santa Fe, anyway; most of them would have been useless in a fight and a burden, had supplies run low, as they were likely to do, on the high plains. Yet, by the sixth day, discontent was so rife that he decided to ford the river despite the risk. Another day or two of waiting and the whole Texas-Santa Fe expedition might simply melt into the Brazos mud. In retrospect, he regretted not letting the men chase the buffalo—it would have given them some sporting exploits to talk about around the campfires. His reasoning in holding them back had been sound, but the weather confounded his reason, as it was apt to.

Both Bes-Das and Alchise were against the crossing. The Brazos was still too high. Shadrach was against it, and Bigfoot too, although Bigfoot agreed with the Colonel that if they didn’t cross soon the expedition would quietly disband. All the scouts remembered the fate of Captain Falconer, though. They offered little advice, knowing that the wrong piece of advice might get them shot.

Gus had not been along for the earlier river crossing, but he had crossed the Mississippi and had no fear of the Brazos.

“Why, this is just a creek,” he said. “I could swim it on my back.”

“I couldn’t,” Call told him. “I swum it twice and it was all I could do, even with a horse pulling me.”

There was no agreement as to the swimming capacity of sheep, so the twenty sheep were tied and tossed in the sturdiest of the wagons. Then, for no reason that anyone could determine, the wagon with the sheep in it capsized in midstream, drowning the driver—he got a foot tangled in the harness—two of the horses, and all twenty sheep. Three of the beeves wandered into quicksand on the south bank—they were mired so deep that Caleb ordered them shot. Sam waded in mud to his thighs, with his butcher knife, to take what meat he could from the three muddy carcasses. Six merchants and four whores decided the Brazos was their limit, and turned back for the settlements. Brognoli was the only man to swim he river without a horse. It was rumoured that Brognoli could swim five miles or more, though there was no body of water large enough to allow the claim to be tested. Caleb Cobb crossed in a canoe he had brought along in one of the wagons for that purpose. The wagon they had been hauling the canoe in was hit by some heavy driftwood; it broke up just shy of the north bank. Only four wagons survived the crossing, but they were the ones containing the ammunition and supplies. The expeditionary force, though a little leaner, was still mostly intact. The four wagons had all they could haul as it was, but Caleb Cobb proceeded to hoist his canoe on top of the largest wagon, despite his scouts’ insistence that he wouldn’t need it.

“Colonel, most of the rivers between here and the Arkansas is just creeks,” Bigfoot said. “That canoe’s wider than some of them. You could turn it upside down and use it as a bridge.”

“Fine, that’s better than traveling wet,” Caleb said. “I despise traveling wet.”

The fourth day north of the Brazos the post oak and elm petered out, and the troop began to move across an open, rolling prairie. There were still plenty of trees along the many creeks, so the troopdidn’t lack for firewood, but the traveling was easier, and the men’s mood improved. Little seeping springs dotted the prairie, producing water that was clearer and more tasteful than that of the muddy Brazos. Deer were plentiful though small, but the men could scarcely raise an interest in venison. They expected to come on the great buffalo herd any day. They had all smelled the buffalo liver Sam had cooked for the Comanches, and were determined to try it for themselves.

Call and Gus had been made scouts, assigned to range ahead with Bes-Das and Alchise. Bigfoot the Colonel kept close at hand— though he valued Bigfoot’s advice, he mainly wanted him handy because he was amused by his conversation. Shadrach had taken a cough, and roamed little. He rode beside Matilda Roberts, his long rifle always across his saddle.

They crossed the Trinity River on a sunny day with no loss of life other than one brown dog, a mongrel who had hung around the camp since the troop’s departure. Sam liked the little dog and fed him scraps. The dog was swimming by a big bay gelding, when the horse panicked and pawed the dog down. Sam was gloomy that night, so gloomy that he failed to salt the beans.

The stars were very bright over the prairie, so bright that Call had trouble sleeping. The only Indians they had seen were a small, destitute band of Kickapoos, who seemed to be living off roots and prairie dogs. When asked if the buffalo herd were near, they shook their heads and looked blank. “No buffalo,” one old man said.

None of the men could figure out what had become of the buffalo —hundreds of thousands of them had crossed the Brazos less than a week before, and yet they had not seen one buffalo, or even a track. Call asked Bigfoot about it, and Bigfoot shrugged.

“When we got across the river, we turned west,” he said. “I reckon them buffalo turned east.”

Even so, the men rode out every day, expecting to see the herd. At night they talked of buffalo, anticipating how good the meat would taste when they finally made their kills. In Austin, they had talked of women, or of notable card games they had been in; on the prairie, they talked of meat. Sam promised to instruct them all in buffalo anatomy—show them where the liver was, and how best to extract the tongue. After weeks in the trees, the breadth and silence of the prairie unnerved some of the men.

“Dern, I can’t get cozy out here,” Johnny Carthage observed. “There’s nothing to stop the damn wind.”

“Why would you want to stop it—just let it blow,” Gus said. “It’s just air that’s on the move.”

“It rings in my ears, though,” Johnny said. “I’d rather bunk up behind a bush.”

“I wonder how far it is, across this prairie?” Jimmy Tweed asked.