“You didn’t need to shoot it, you could have hit it over the head with your gun,” he said.

“Well, it moved quick,” Gus said, lamely. Who would expect an antelope to move slow? The whole troop was looking at him, as if it was entirely his fault that a tasty beast had escaped.

The incident brought Bigfoot to life, though—and Shadrach, too. The old man had entrusted his rifle to Matilda, but he got it back.

“That little buck was just half grown,” Bigfoot said. “I doubt it will run more than a mile. Maybe if we ease along we can kill it yet.” “Maybe,” Shadrach said. “Let’s go.”

The two scouts left together—Caleb Cobb had been walking so far ahead that he was unaware of the incident until he decided it was time to make a dry camp for the night. He had heard the shot and supposed someone had surprised some game. When he got back and discovered that both his scouts were gone in pursuit of an antelope, he was not pleased.

“Both of them went, after one little buck?” he asked. “Now, that was foolish, particularly when we got all this good horse meat to nibble on.”

Night fell and deepened, the sunset dying slowly along the wide western horizon. Matilda Roberts was pacing nervously. She blamed herself for not having tried harder to discourage Shadrach from going after the antelope. Bigfoot was younger—he could have tracked the antelope alone.

By midnight the whole camp had given up on the scouts. Matilda could not stop sobbing. Memory of Indians was on everybody’s mind. The two men could be enduring fierce tortures even then. Gus thought of the missed shot, time after time. If he only hadn’t had his rifle over his shoulder, he could have hit the antelope. But all his remembering didn’t help. The antelope was gone, and so were the scouts.

“Maybe they just camped and went to sleep,” Long Bill suggested. “It’s hard enough to find your way on this dern plain in the daylight. How could anyone do it at night?”

“Shadrach ain’t never been lost, night or day,” Matilda said. “He can find his way anywhere. He’d be here, if he wasn’t dead.”

Then she broke down again.

“He’s dead—he’s dead, I know it,” she said. “That goddamn hump man got him.”

“If he wasn’t dead, I’d shoot him, or Wallace one,” Caleb said. “I lost my dog and both my scouts in the same day. Why it would take two scouts to track one antelope buck is a conundrum.”

“Say that again—a what?” Long Bill asked. Brognoli sat beside him, his head still jerking, his look still glassy eyed. In the moments when his head stopped jerking, it was twisted at an odd angle on his neck.

“A conundrum,” Caleb repeated. “I visited Harvard College once and happened to learn the word.”

“What does it mean, sir?” Call asked.

‘ “I believe it’s Latin,” Gus said. One of his sisters had given him a Latin lesson, in the afternoon once, and he was anxious to impress Caleb Cobb with his mental powers—perhaps he’d make sergeant yet.

“Oh, are you a scholar, Mr. McCrae?” Caleb asked.

“No, but I still believe it’s Latin—I’ve had lessons,” Gus said. The lessons part was a lie. After one lesson of thirty minutes duration he had given up the Latin language forever.

“Well, I heard it in Boston, and Boston ain’t very Latin,” Caleb said. “Conundrum is a thing you can’t figure out. What I can’t figure out is why two scouts would go after one antelope.”

“Two’s better than one, out here,” Long Bill said. “I wouldn’t want to go walking off without somebody with me who knew the way back.”

“If Shad ain’t dead, he’s left,” Matilda said. “He was talking about leaving anyway.”

“Left to do what?” Caleb asked. “We’re on the Staked Plains. All there is to do is wander.”

“Left, just left,” Matilda said. “I guess he didn’t want to take me with him.”

Then Matilda broke down. She sobbed deeply for awhile, and then her sobs turned to howls. Her whole body shook and she howled and howled, as if she were trying to howl up her guts. In the emptiness of the prairies the howls seemed to hover in the air. They made the men uneasy—it was as if a great she-wolf were howling, only the she-wolf was in their midst. No one could understand it. Shadrach had gone off to kill an antelope buck, and Matilda was howling—a woman abandoned.

Many of the men shifted a little, wishing the woman would just be quiet. She was a whore. No one had asked her to form an attachment to old Shadrach anyway. He was a mountain man—mountain men were born to wander.

Several men had been hoping Matilda would become a whore again—they had a long walk ahead, and a little coupling would at least be a diversion. But hearing her howl, the same men, Long Bill among them, began to have second thoughts. The woman was howling like a beast, and a frightening beast at that. Coupling with her would be risky. Besides, old Shadrach might not be gone. He might return at an inconvenient time and take offense.

Caleb Cobb was unaffected by Matilda’s howling. He was eating a piece of horse meat—he glanced at Matilda from time to time. It amused him that the troop had become so uneasy, just because a woman was crying. Love, with all its mystery, had arrived in their midst, and they didn’t like it. A whore had fallen in love with an old man of the mountains. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it had.

The men were unnerved by it—such a thing was unnecessary, even unnatural. Even the Comanches, in a way, worried them less. Comanches did what they were expected to, which was kill whites. It might mean war to the death, but at least there was no uncertainty about what to expect. But here was a woman howling like a she-wolf—what sense did that make?

“Love’s a terrible price to pay for company, ain’t it, Matty?” Caleb said. “I won’t pay it, myself. I’d rather do without the company.”

One by one, the exhausted men fell asleep. Gus wanted to play cards; there was rarely a night when the urge for cardplaying didn’t come over him. But the men ignored him. They didn’t want to play cards when they had nothing to play for, and were thirsty anyway. It was pointless to play cards when Buffalo Hump and his warriors might be about to hurl down on them, and Johnny Carthage said as much.

“Well, they ain’t here now, why can’t we play a few hands?” Gus asked, annoyed that his friends were such sleepyheads.

The men didn’t even answer. They just ignored him. For awhile, once Matty’s howls subsided, the only sound in camp was the sound of shuffling cards—Gus shuffled and shuffled the deck, to keep his hands busy.

Call took the guard—he went away from camp a little ways to stand it. He preferred to be apart at night, to think over the day’s action—if there was action. It might be that he would command a troop someday. He wanted to learn; and yet he had no teachers. He was on his second expedition as a Ranger and nothing on either expedition had been well planned. In all their encounters with the Indians, the Indians had outplanned them and outfought them, by such a margin that it was partly luck that any of them survived.

Call couldn’t understand it. Caleb Cobb had spoken of Harvard College, and Major Chevallie had been at West Point—Call knew little about Harvard College, but he did know that West Point was where generals and colonels were trained. If these men had such good schooling, why didn’t they plan better? It was worrisome. Now they were out in the middle of a big plain, and no one seemed to know much about where they were going or how to survive until they got there. No one knew how to find water reliably, or what plants they could eat, if they had to eat plants. It was fine to rely on game, if there was game, but what if there wasn’t? Even old Jesus,the Mexican blacksmith in San Antonio, knew more about plants than any one of the Rangers—though maybe not more than Sam had known.

It was obviously wrong to allow only one or two men in a troop to be keepers of all the knowledge that the troop needed for survival. Sam had known how to doctor, but he had fallen over a cliff and no one had bothered to get instructions from him about how to treat various wounds. Call had been made a little uneasy by Matilda’s howling, but he was not as affected by it as most of the other men. Probably she would stop crying when she wore out; probably she would get up and be herself again, the next day. Call liked Matilda: she had been helpful to him on more than one occasion. The fact that she had fastened on Shadrach to love was a matter beyond his scope. People could love whom they pleased, he supposed. That was excusable—what wasn’t excusable, in his view, was setting off on a long, dangerous expedition without adequate preparation. He resolved that if he ever got to lead Rangers, he would see that each man under his command received clear training and sound instruction, so they would have a chance to survive, if the commander was lost.