“Well, it’s far,” Blackie Slidell said. “They say you can walk all the way to Canada on it.”

“I have no interest in hearing about Canada,” Jimmy Tweed said. “I’d rather locate Santa Fe and get me a shave.”

There was a whole group of men just come from Missouri, especially to join the expedition. They were a sour lot, in Gus’s view, seldom exchanging more than a word or two with the Texans, and not many among themselves. They camped a little apart, and were led by a short, red-bearded man named Dakluskie. Gus tried to make friends with one or two of the Missourians, meaning to draw them into a card game, but they rebuffed him. The only one he developed a liking for was a boy named Tommy Spencer, no more than fourteen years old. Dakluskie was his uncle and had brought him along to do camp chores. Tommy Spencer thought Texas Rangers were all fine fellows. When he could, he sneaked over to sit at the campfire with them, listening to them yarn. He had a martial spirit, and carried an old pistol that was his pride.

“I wish I was from Texas,” he told Gus. “There ain’t no fighting much left, back in Missouri.”

The second day north of the Trinity, Gus and Call had ridden out with Bes-Das to scout for easy fords across the many creeks, when they came over a ridge and saw a running buffalo coming right toward them. The buffalo was a cow, and had been running awhile—her tongue hung out, and her gait was unsteady. Some thirty yards behind her an Indian was in pursuit, with a second Indian still farther back. The buffalo and her two pursuers appeared so suddenly that no one thought to shoot either the beast or the Comanches. The first Indian had a lance in his hand, the second one a bow. They rode right by Call, not thirty yards away, but seemed not to notice him at all, so focused were they on the buffalo they wanted to kill.

Bes-Das looked amused—he flashed a crooked-toothed smile, and turned his mount to lope back and watch the chase. Gus and Call turned, too—the encampment was only one or two miles back: the Comanches were chasing the exhausted buffalo right toward a hundred Texans and a few Missourians.

It was a warm, pretty morning. Most of the men were feeling lazy, hoping the Colonel would content himself with a short march for the day. They were lying on their saddles or saddle blankets, playing cards, discoursing about this and that, when suddenly the buffalo and the two Comanches ran right into camp, with Bes-Das, Call, and Gus loping along slightly to the rear. The spectacle was so strange and so unexpected that several of the men decided they must be dreaming. They lay or stood where they were, amazed. Caleb Cobb had just stepped out of his tent and stood dumbfounded, as a buffalo and two Comanches ran right in front of him, scarcely twenty feet away. The Irish dog had gone hunting, and missed the scene. Neither of the Comanches seemed to notice that they were right in the middle of a Ranger encampment, so intent were they on not letting their tired prey escape. They had passed almost through camp, from north to south, when a shot rang out and the buffalo cow fell dead, turning a somersault as she fell. Old Shadrach, shooting across his saddle, had fired the shot.

When the buffalo fell, the two Comanches stopped and simply sat on their horses, both of which were quivering with fatigue. The skinny warriors had a glazed look; they were too exhausted to get down and cut up the meat they had wanted so badly. Around the encampment, Rangers began to stand up and look to their guns. The Comanches came to with a start and flailed their horses before anyone could fire.

“Hell, shoot ‘em—shoot ‘em!” Shadrach yelled. His ammunition was over by Matilda’s saddle—he could not get it and reload in time to shoot the Comanches himself.

The Rangers got off a few shots, but by then, the Comanches had made it into a little copse of post oak; the bullets only clipped leaves.

“Well, this is a record, I guess,” Caleb said. “Two red Indians rode all the way through camp, chasing a tired buffalo, and nobody shot em.”

“It’s worse than that,” Call said. “We rode along with them for two miles, and didn’t shoot ‘em.”

“They were after the buffalo,” Gus said. “They didn’t even notice us.”

“No, they were too hungry, I expect,” Bigfoot said. He had witnessed the event with solemn amazement. It seemed to him the Indians must have been taking some kind of powders, to miss the fact that they were riding through a Ranger camp.

“Yes, I expect so,” Caleb said. “They wanted that buffalo bad.”

“Should we go get them, sir?” Long Bill asked. “Their horses are about worn out.”

“No, let them go, maybe they’ll starve,” Caleb said. “If I send a troop after them, they’ll just kill half of it and steal themselves fresh horses.”

Shadrach was annoyed all day because no one had shot the Comanches.

“Bes-Das should have shot them, he seen them first,” he said. “Bigfoot must have been drunk, else he would have shot ‘em.”

Shadrach had begun to repeat himself—it worried Matilda Roberts.

“You say the same things, over and over, Shad,” she told him, but Shadrach went right on repeating himself. Over and over he told her the story of how he saved himself in a terrible blizzard on the Platte: he killed a large buffalo cow, cut her open, and crawled inside; the cow’s body stayed warm long enough to keep him alive.

Matilda didn’t want to think of Shadrach inside a buffalo cow. Sam butchered the one the two Comanches had chased into camp; he made blood sausage of the buffalo blood, but Matilda didn’t eat any. Shad’s story was too much on her mind.

That night, lying with the old man as he smoked his long pipe, Matilda held his rough hand. The plains scared her—she wanted to be close to Shadrach. Since crossing the Brazos, she had begun to realize that she was tired of being a whore. She was tired of having to walk off in the bushes with her quilt because some Ranger had a momentary lust. Besides, there were no bushes anymore. Whoring on the prairies meant going over a hill or a ridge, and there could always be a Comanche over the hill or the ridge.

Besides, she had come to have such a fondness for Shadrach that she had no interest in going with other men, and in fact didn’t like it. Shad’s joints ached at times, from too many blizzards on the Platte and too many nights sleeping wet. He groaned and moaned in his sleep. Matilda knew he needed her warmth, to ease his joints.

Shadrach had become so stiff that he could not reach down to pull his boots on and pull them off. Matilda faithfully pulled them off for him. No woman had been so kind before, and it touched him. He had begun to get surly when a Ranger with an interest in being a customer approached Matilda now.

“Would you ever get hitched, Shad?” Matilda asked, the night after the buffalo ran through camp.

“It would depend on the gal,” Shadrach said.

“What if I was the gal?” Matilda asked. It was a bold question, but she needed to know.

Shadrach smiled. He knew of Matilda’s fondness for him, and was flattered by it. After all, he was old and woolly, and the camp was full of young scamps, some of them barely old enough to have hair on their balls.

“You—what would you want with me?” he asked, to tease her. “I’m an old berry. My pod’s about dry.”

“I’d get hitched with you anyway, Shad,” Matilda said.

Shadrach had been married once, to a Cree beauty on the Red River of the north. She had been killed in a raid by the Sioux, some forty years back. All he remembered about her was that she made the tastiest pemmican on the Northern plains.

“Why, Matty, I thought you had the notion to go to California,” Shadrach said. “I’ve not got that much traveling in me, I don’t expect. I’ve done been west to the Gila and that’s far enough west for me.”

“They’ll have a train to California someday,” Matilda said. “I’ll wait, and we’ll take the train. Until then I guess New Mexico will do, if it ain’t too sandy.”