"Wait," Buffalo Hump said, as Blue Duck was about to walk away. "You may see Kicking Wolf while you are travelling." "I may," Blue Duck said.
"He owes me six horses," Buffalo Hump said. "If he has stolen a lot of horses from the Texans, it is time he gave me my six. Tell him to bring them soon." "He won't bring them--he is too greedy for horses," Blue Duck said.
Buffalo Hump didn't answer. A gust of wind blew shards of sleet into the little warm place under the rock. Buffalo Hump knocked the sleet off his blanket and looked into the fire.
By morning Augustus McCrae was so tired that he had lost the ability to tell up from down. The dawn was sleet gray, the plain sleet gray as well. There was not a feature to stop the eye on the long plain: no tree, ridge, rise, hill, dip, animal, or bird.
Augustus could see nothing at all, and he was well known to have the best vision in the troop. The plain was so wide it seemed you could see to the rim of forever, and yet, in all that distance, there was nothing.
Augustus, like the other rangers, had been in the saddle thirty-six hours. Before the chase started he had been up all night, whoring and drinking; now he was so tired he thought he might be losing his mind. There were those among his comrades who thought that it was excessive whoring and drinking that had caused Gus's hair to turn white, almost overnight; but his own view was that too many long patrols had fatigued his hair so that it had lost its color.
Now, when he looked up, the horizon seemed to roll. It was as if the plain was turning over, like a plate. Augustus's stomach, which had little in it, began to turn, too. For a moment, he had the sensation that the sky was below him, the earth above. He needed to see something definite--an antelope, a tree, anything--ffrid himself of the queasy sensation he got when the land seemed to tip. It grew so bad, the rolling, that at one point he felt his own horse was above him, its feet attached to the sky.
The more Gus thought about it, the angrier he became at Captain Scull.
"If he don't stop for breakfast I'm just going to dismount right here and die," Gus said. "I'm so tired I'm confusing up with down." "I guess he'll stop when he hits the Canadian," Call said. "I doubt it's much further." "No, and I doubt the North Pole is much further, either," Gus said. "Why has he brought us
here? There's nothing here." Call was weary, too. All the men were weary.
Some slept in their saddles, despite the cold.
Under the circumstances, Call just wanted to concentrate on seeing that no one fell behind, or straggled off and got lost. Though the plain looked entirely flat, it wasn't. There were dips so shallow they didn't look like dips, and rises so gradual they didn't seem to be rises. A ranger might ride off a little distance from the troop, to answer a call of nature, only to find, once the call was answered, that he had traversed a dip or crossed a rise and become completely lost. The troop would have vanished, in only a few minutes. A man lost on the llano would wander until he starved-- or until the Comanches got him.
Call wanted to devote what energies he had to seeing that no one got lost. It was vexing to have to turn his attention from that important task to answer Gus's questions--particularly since they were questions that Gus himself ought to know the answer to.
"He brought us here to catch Kicking Wolf and get those horses back," Call said. "Did you think he was leading us all this way just to exercise our horses?" Ahead they could see Inish Scull, his coat white with sleet, moving at the same steady pace he had maintained the whole way. Hector's shaggy coat steamed from melting sleet. It crossed Call's mind to wonder just how far Hector could travel without rest. Would it be one hundred miles, or two hundred? The Captain was well ahead of the troop. Seen from a distance he seemed very small, in relation to his huge mount. Seen up close, though, that changed.
No one thought of Inish Scull as small when his eyes were boring into them, as he delivered commands or criticisms. Then all anyone remembered was that he was a captain in the Texas Rangers--size didn't enter into it.
Augustus's head was still swimming. The horizon still rocked, but talking to Woodrow helped a little. Woodrow Call was too hardheaded to grow confused about up and down; he was never likely to get sky and land mixed up.
"He's not going to catch Kicking Wolf," Gus said. "I expect the reason he's rarely run off from is because he's careful who he chases.
If you ask me, he usually just chases the ones he knows he can catch." Call had been thinking the same thing, though he had no intention of saying it in front of the men.
He didn't like to be doubting his captain, but it did seem to him that Captain Scull had met his match in the game of chase and pursuit. Kicking Wolf had had nearly a day's start, and the shifting weather made tracking difficult. Inish Scull didn't like to turn his troop, any more than he liked to turn his own head when spitting tobacco juice. He seemed to think he could keep an enemy ahead of him by sheer force of will, until he wore him down. But Kicking Wolf had lured the Captain onto the llano, which was his place. He wasn't subject to anybody's will--not even Buffalo Hump's, if reports were true.