first three hours belonged to Hat Creek horses. He almost decided to go back and get Deets, though he knew Call would be reluctant to surrender him.
Finally, by circling wide to the northwest, Augustus crossed the three horses’ tracks. Blue Duck had tried the one trick—crossing the stampede—but that was all. After that the tracks bore straight for the northwest, so unerringly that Augustus soon found he didn’t need to pay much attention to them. If he lost them he could usually pick them up within half a mile.
He rode as hard as he dared, but he had only one horse and couldn’t afford to ruin him. At each watering he let him have a few minutes of rest. He rode all night, and the next day the tracks were still bearing northwest. He felt unhappy with himself for he wasn’t catching up. Lorena was getting a taste of hard travel the like of which she had never imagined. Probably she would have worse to deal with than hard travel unless she was very lucky, and Augustus knew it was his fault. He should have packed her into camp the minute he discovered who Blue Duck was; in retrospect he couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t. It was the kind of lapse he had been subject to all his life: things that were clearly dangerous didn’t worry him enough.
He tried to swallow his regrets and concentrate on finding her: after all, it had happened, and why he had let it no longer particularly mattered. Blue Duck was a name from their past. Having him show up in their midst fifteen years later had thrown his reasoning off.
The second day he stopped tracking altogether, since it was plain Blue Duck was heading for the Staked Plains. That took in a lot of territory, of course, but Augustus thought he knew where Blue Duck would go: to an area north and west of the Palo Duro Canyon—it was there he had always retreated to when pursued.
Once Call and he had sat on the western edge of the great canyon, looking across the brown waterless distances to the west. They had finally decided to end their pursuit there while they had a fair chance of getting back alive. It wasn’t Indians they feared so much as lack of water. It had been midsummer and the plains looked seared, what grass there was, brown and brittle. Call was frustrated; he hated to turn back before he caught his man.
“There’s got to be water out there,” Call said. “They cross it, and they can’t drink dirt.”
“Yes, but they know where it is and we don’t,” Augustus pointed out. “They can kill their horses getting to it—they got more horses. But if we kill ours it’s a dern long walk back to San Antonio.”
That afternoon he crossed the Clear Fork of the Brazos and passed a half-built cabin, abandoned and empty. It was a vivid enough reminder of the power of the Comanches—their massacres caused plenty of settlers to retreat while they still had legs to retreat on. Call and he had watched through the Fifties as the line of the frontier advanced only to collapse soon after. The men and women who came up the Trinity and the Brazos were no strangers to hardship—but hardship was one thing, terror another. The land was spacious and theirs for the taking, but land couldn’t cancel out fear—a fact that Call never understood. It annoyed him that the whites gave up and retreated.
“I wish they’d stick,” he said many times. “If they would, there’d soon be enough of them to beat back the Indians.”
“You ain’t never laid in bed all night with a scared woman,” Augustus said. “You can’t start a farm if you’ve got to live in a fort. Them that starts the farms have got to settle off by themselves, which means they’re easy to cut off and carve up.”
“Well, they could leave the women for a while,” Call said. “Send for them when it’s safe.”
“Yes, but a man that goes to the trouble to take a wife don’t generally want to go off and leave her,” Augustus pointed out. “It means doing the chores all by yourself. Besides, without a wife handy you won’t be getting no kids, and kids are a wonderful source of free labor. They’re cheaper than slaves by a damn sight.”
They had argued the point for years, but fruitlessly, for Call had no sympathy for human weakness. Augustus put it down to