“We would appreciate some biscuits,” he said. “These children ain’t eaten nothing but a few bites of rabbit, in the last day.”

“Give them what they need,” Caleb said. “Give them the biscuits and some bacon too.”

He looked back at the escarpment, clearly disturbed by Goodnight’s news.“I guess you don’t think much of our wagons, do you?” he asked.

“Them wagons would do fine to go to market in,” Goodnight said. “But you ain’t going to market. You’ll never get ‘em up the hill. You’ll have to take what you can carry and hope you find game.”

“Why, dammit, I was told there was a passage along the Red River,” Caleb said. “I was hoping we’d come to it tomorrow.”

Goodnight looked at him oddly, as if he were listening to a child.

“If you suppose you’re on the Red, then you’re worse lost than I thought,” Goodnight said. “This ain’t the Red, it’s the Big Wichita. The Red is a far piece ahead yet—I took back these horses just shy of the Red. You might make the Prairie Dog Fork of the Brazos, if you don’t jump no more cougars and lose no more mules.”

“You’re a wonder, sir—how did you know about the cougar?” Caleb asked.

“Tracks,” Goodnight said. “I ain’t blind. I’ve never met the mule yet that could tolerate cougars.”

Then he noticed Shadrach, standing by Matilda—Bigfoot was nearby.

“Why, Shad—are you a hundred yet?” he asked. “Hello, Miss Roberts.”

He tipped his hat, as did the cowboy named Bill and the Negro named Bose.

“I’m crowding it, Charlie,” Shadrach said.

“Hello, Wallace—why would you want to walk all the way to New Mexico to get hung?” Goodnight asked Bigfoot. “Ain’t there enough hang ropes in Texas for you?”

“I ain’t planning on no hanging, Charlie,” Bigfoot said. “I expect to fill my pockets with gold and silver and go back to Texas and buy a ranch.”

Goodnight nodded. “Oh, that’s it, is it?” he said. “You’re all out for booty, I guess. You’ve heard there are big chunks of gold and silver lying in the streets, I expect.”

“Well, we’ve heard minerals were plentiful,” Caleb said. Less and less did he like this blunt fellow, Charlie Goodnight—yet the man’s news, unwelcome as it was, was valuable, considering their situation. It was mortifying to be the leader of an expedition and discover that you were not even on the right river.

“There are minerals aplenty—in the governor’s vault,” Goodnight said. “He might open it for you and ask you to help yourselves,but I doubt it. That ain’t the way of governors—not the ones I’ve met.”

There was silence throughout the troop. Goodnight was not particularly likable, but few of the men could doubt that he knew what he was talking about. If he said they were putting themselves in danger of starvation only to run the risk of being hanged upon arrival, it well might be true.

“It’s a marvel that you rode off and got your horses back, Mr. Goodnight,” Caleb said. “We’ve not had much luck pursuing the red boys. If there’s a special method you use I’d appreciate it if you’d tell us what it is—it could be that we’ll lose stock, and we can’t afford to.”

“No, you can’t, you’ll have to eat most of these horses, I expect,” Goodnight said.

He looked at the solemn group of men, some of them with hopes still high for adventure and booty in New Mexico. Not for the first time, he was impressed by the folly of men.

“How’d you get ‘em back, sir?” Caleb asked again.

“Well, they were my horses,” Goodnight said. “I’ll be damned if I’ll give up twenty horses to Kicking Wolf, not without a chase.

“Pardon me for cussing, Miss Roberts,” he said, again tipping his hat.

“The only way to get horses back from Indians is to outrun them —it’s why I try to stay well mounted,” he went on. “We caught them near the Red. There were four warriors and these children. We killed two warriors, but Kicking Wolf and his brother got away.”

Sam handed him a little packet of biscuits, and some meat.

“Thank you,” Goodnight said. “These young ladies have been too scared to eat. But they ain’t hurt—I expect they’ll get hungry one of these days.”

“They’re pretty girls—I hope they eat,” Sam said. “I have a little jelly saved—plum jelly. Maybe it will tempt them.”

He handed Goodnight a small jar of jelly—Goodnight looked at it and put it in his saddlebag.

“If it don’t tempt the young ladies it will sure tempt me,” he said. Then he looked again at Caleb Cobb.

“If you make the Red and any of them wagons still have the wheels on them, stick to the river and follow it west. There’s a place called the Narrows, where you might get through.““Angosturas,” Alchise said, nodding.

“Yes, that’s what the Mexicans call it,” Goodnight said. “I call it the Narrows.”

Then he tipped his hat to Matilda a third time. *‘Let’s go, Bose,” he said.

Soon the cloud of dust from the twenty horses was floating over the gullies to the south. >

“Charlie Goodnight’s salty,” Bigfoot observed.

“I agree,” Caleb said.

CALEB COBB RODE ALONE most of that day, accompanied only by his Irish dog. If he was disturbed to discover that he was not on the river he thought he was on, he didn’t express it. Nonetheless, the troop was uneasy. There was little talk. Each man rode along, alone with his thoughts. Gus tried once or twice to discuss the situation with Call, but Call didn’t answer. He was trying to push down the feeling that the whole expedition was foolish. They didn’t even know which river they were on, and their commander’s estimation of the distance they had to travel was off by hundreds of miles. They had already lost several men and most of their wagons; they had killed and eaten the last of their beeves. If there was any game in the area, no one could spot it.

“I despise poor planning,” he said.

Gus, though, was feeling frisky. He could not stay in low spirits long, not when the day was fine and the country glorious.

“Why, you can see a hundred miles, if you stand up in your stirrups,” he said. “I prefer it to the trees, myself.

“For one thing, Indians can hide in the trees,” he added.

“They hid pretty well out beyond the Pecos, and there wasn’t no trees out there,” Call reminded him. “There could be a hundred of them watching us right now and you’ll never see them.”

“Oh, shut up, you always think the worst,” Gus said, annoyed by his friend’s pessimistic nature. All he wanted to do was enjoy a fine afternoon on the prairies. He did not want to have to consider that there might be a hundred Indians in hiding in the next gully, or any gully. All he wanted was to enjoy the gallop out to New Mexico—it took the pleasure out of adventure to always be worrying, as his friend did.

Call was not the only one in the company who was worried, though. That night Bes-Das and Alchise disappeared, taking six horses.

“I guess they didn’t want to be shot down like Falconer was,” Bigfoot said. “Caleb’s too quick to flare. It ain’t good leading to be shooting down people we might need.”

“I don’t guess we’re any worse off than we were,” Long Bill pointed out. “Those two were lost anyway. That fellow Goodnight is about the only man who knows his way around, out in these parts.”

Two more wagons were lost between the Prairie Dog Fork of the Brazos and the wide pans of the Red River. Caleb put all the ammunition in the one wagon and told the men to keep only such gear as they could carry on their horses. That night they ate catfish—the river was low and some of the fish were trapped in shallow ponds. The men sharpened willow sticks into crude spears. More than fifty sizable fish were taken, cooked, and devoured, and yet the men went to bed unsatisfied.

“Eating fish is like eating air,” Jimmy Tweed observed. “It goes in but it don’t fill you up.”

Once they passed through the Narrows the great plain spread west before them. Though they had been on the prairie for weeks, none of them were prepared for the way the sky and the earth seemed to widen, once they rose onto the Llano Estacado. After a day or two on the llano the meaning of distance seemed changed. The great plain, silent and endless, became the world. In relation to the plain, they felt like ants. The smaller world of towns andcreeks and clumps of forest seemed difficult to remember. At night on the llano, with the sky a star-strewn plain of darkness overhead, Gus tried to keep Clara in mind, but the thought that he had fallen in love with a girl, in a dusty little general store in Austin, had come to seem far away and insubstantial, like the dust motes that had floated down the sunbeams in the store. The girl and the store had been for the day—the great plain was forever.