“I’d get hitched with you—sure,” Shadrach said. “Maybe we’ll run into a preacher, somewhere up the trail.”

“If we don’t, we could ask the Colonel to hitch us,” Matilda said.

A little later, when the old man was sleeping, Matilda got up and sneaked two extra blankets out of the baggage wagon. The dews had been exceptionally heavy at night. She didn’t want her husband-to-be getting wet on the dewy ground.

Black Sam saw her take the blankets. He used a chunk of firewood for a pillow, himself. Sometimes, when the fire burned low, he would turn over and burn his pillow.

“I need those blankets, Sam-don’t tell,” Matilda said. She was fond of Sam too, though in a different way.

“I won’t, Miss Matty,” Sam said.

IN TWO WEEKS THE beeves were gone, and the troop was living on mush. The expedition had pointed to the northwest, and came to a long stretch of rough, bald country that led upward to a long escarpment. Though the escarpment was still fifty miles away, they could see it.

“What’s up there?” Gus asked Bigfoot. “Comanches,” Bigfoot said. “Them and the Kiowa.” The tall boy, Jimmy Tweed, had begun to bunk with Call and Gus. Jimmy and Gus were soon joshing each other and trying to outdo each other in pranks or card tricks. They would have tried to beat each other at whoring, but all the whores except Matilda had turned back at the Brazos, and Matilda had retired. So desperate was the situation that a youth from Navasota named John Baca was caught having congress with his mare. The troop laughed about it for days; Johnny Baca blushed every time anyone looked at him. But many of the men, in the privacy of their thoughts, wondered if Johnny Baca had not made a sensible move. Brognoli, the quartermaster, merely shrugged tolerantly at the notion of a boy having congress with a mare.

“Why not?” he asked. “The mare don’t care.”

“She may not care, but I’ll be damned if I’ll go with a horse,” Gus said.

“Besides, I don’t own a mare,” he added, a little later.

The complete disappearance of the great buffalo herd continued to puzzle everyone. Call, Gus, and Bes-Das scouted as much as thirty miles ahead, and yet not an animal could be found.

“No wonder them Comanches run that one cow right into camp,” Gus said on the third evening, when they sat down to a supper of mush. “It was that or starve, I guess.”

“It’s a big prairie,” Bigfoot reminded him. “Those buffalo could be three or four hundred miles north, by now.”

Not long before they spotted the escarpment they came upon a stream that Bes-Das thought was the Red, the river they counted on to take them west to New Mexico. Bes-Das was the scout who was supposed to be most familiar with the Comanche country— everyone felt relieved when they struck the river. It seemed they were practically to New Mexico. The water was bad, though—not as bad as the Pecos, in Call’s view, but bad enough that most of the troop was soon bothered with cramps and retchings. The area proved to be unusually snaky, too. The low, shaley hills were so flush with snakes that Call could sometimes hear three or four rattling at the same time.

Before they had been on the river half a day, Elihu Carson, the dentist, walked off to squat awhile, in the grip of a series of cramps, and had the bad luck to get bitten in the ass by a rattlesnake. Several men testified that they had heard the snake rattle, but Elihu Carson was a little deaf—he didn’t hear the warning.

“I think you’re cursed, Carson,” the Colonel said, when informed of the accident. “First you trip on your suitcase and get stickers in your face, and now you have fangs in your ass.”

“Sir, everything is sharp in this part of the country,” the dentist said.

Most of the men expected Carson to die of snakebite, and those he had extracted teeth from hoped that he would. But Elihu Carson confounded them. He showed only brief ill effects—four hours after the bite, he was pulling one of young Tommy Spencer’s teeth.The boy from Missouri had let a horse kick him right in the face, and had two broken front teeth to show for his carelessness.

Later that day, the mules pulling the main supply wagon spooked at a cougar that bounded out of a little clump of bushes right in front of them. Gus and several others blazed away at the cougar, but the cat got clean away. The mules fled down a gully, pulling the heavy wagon: it struck a rock, turned completely over in the air, and burst apart. One of the wheels came off its axle and rolled on down the gully out of sight. Caleb Cobb’s canoe, which had been on top of the load, smashed to bits. One mule broke its leg and had to be shot.

While Brognoli and several other Rangers were standing around the wreck, debating whether there was any hope of repairing the big wagon, Alchise, the half-breed scout, pointed to the north. All Call saw was an advancing cloud of dust—the troop took cover and prepared for battle, but the source of the dust turned out to be a herd of horses, about twenty in number, being driven by two white men and a Negro. One of the white men, a bulky fellow with a thick brown beard, was leading another horse, with two little girls on it. The little girls were about five or six; both were blond. They were a good deal scratched up, and looked scared. Neither of them spoke at all, though Sam and Brognoli tried to coax them down, and offered them biscuits. The three men looked as if they had been dipped in dust. They had clearly ridden fast and hard.

“Howdy, I’m Charlie Goodnight,” the large man said. “This is Bill and this is Bose.”

“Get down and take some coffee,” Caleb offered. “We’ve just had a wreck. My canoe is ruined and I don’t know what else.”

“No, we can’t pause,” Charles Goodnight said. “These girls were stolen two weeks ago, from down by Weatherford. Their parents will have no peace of mind until I return them.”

“They also ran off these horses,” the man said. “We had to race to catch up with the rascals.”

“At least you succeeded,” Caleb said. “Comanches took ‘em?”

“Yes, Kicking Wolf, he’s a clever thief,” Goodnight said. “What are you doing taking wagons across the baldies?”

“Why, ain’t you heard of us, Mr. Goodnight?” Caleb asked. By this time the whole troop had gathered around the travelers. “I’m Colonel Cobb. We’re the Texas-Santa Fe expedition, heading out towards New Mexico.”

“Why?” Goodnight asked bluntly. Call thought the man’s manner short to the point of rudeness. He wasn’t insolent, though—just blunt.

“Well, we mean to annex it,” Caleb said. “We may have to hang a few Mexicans in the process, but I expect we’ll soon whip ‘em back.”

“No, they’ll hang you—if you get there,” Goodnight said.

“Why wouldn’t we get there, sir?” Caleb asked, a little stung by the man’s brusque attitude.

“I doubt you know the way—that’s one reason,” Goodnight said. “There ain’t water enough between here and Santa Fe to keep this many horses alive. That’s two reasons.”

He rose in his saddle and pointed toward the escarpment, a thin line in the distance, with white clouds floating over it.

“That’s the caprock,” he said. “Once you’re on top of it there’s nothing.”

“Well, there has to be something,” Caleb said. “There’s grass, at least.”

“Yes sir, lots of grass,” Goodnight said. “I’ve rarely met the man who can live on grass, though, and I’ve rarely seen the horse that could travel five hundred miles without water.”

Caleb Cobb was stunned by the comment.

“Five hundred miles—are you sure?” he asked. “We thought it would be another hundred, at most.”

“That’s what I said to begin with,” Goodnight said. “You don’t know where you’re going.”

He turned and glanced at the three remaining wagons. The mules were exhausted from pulling the heavy wagons in and out of gullies —and Call could see that there seemed to be no end of gullies stretching west. Goodnight shook his head, and glanced back at the little girls, to see that they were all right.