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Near the end of that terrible, bloody day, he had looked at the sun falling to the west, sensing in the old core of him that this time of the year was well past the season for planting. Instead of crops, here in this meadow all that had been sown was blood and terror and death. What else could the Kwahadi now reap but more blood and terror and death?

That morning as the sky had lightened in the east, the hundreds of horsemen had been filled with great heart to overrun this place of the tai-bo hide men. But now as that sun sank in despair, the hundreds had found the white hunters awake and not to be clubbed in their sleep, found the enemy’s big guns shooting far and accurately, discovered the white men tenaciously clinging to the shadows of their earth-walled burrows. Every bit of fight had seeped out of the warriors.

Like translucent milk oozing from the old sow’s teats as one of her piglets came loose, the fight had gone out of these hundreds. Like that milk gone bad, their sun-dance war medicine had gone sour in the mouths of the Kwahadi.

By sundown Lone Wolf rode away with the Kiowa. No man tried to stop them.

That next morning Tall One awoke in the gray stillness to see the Shahiyena of Medicine Water and Rock Forehead and the rest mounting up. They said they were going to ride north, raid settlements where there were no tai-bo hide hunters with their far-shooting guns.

Eventually the moon shrank from its former grandeur. The same way the hope that Tall One had once recognized on the face of the gray-eyed war chief faded in those days after the fight at the earth lodges. What man would not feel some despair, having watched so many warriors hurl themselves against the might of the buffalo hunters’ guns, and still call himself a man who cared for his people?

In those first days of frustration and rage as the war chief reluctantly turned his back on the meadow and led his horsemen away from that place of blood and defeat, there had been much angry talk, for most had yet to sort through the confusion borne of loss of hope.

Some believed their sin had been to hold Isatai’s sun dance.

“Other tribes hold their annual sun-gazing dances—but the Comanche have never celebrated in that fashion,” they said.

“Yes! We must never again follow the ways of the Shahiyena or the Kiowa. We must put our feet only on the path walked by the ancient ones.”

Once again the gray-eyed war chief and the headmen decided that The People were to avoid the white man just as they had attempted to do for far back in the generations. Only when it proved wise for the young men to attack outlying settlements to reap horses and scalps and plunder would the old men approve of such contact with the tai-bos. Yet those leaders grappled with the new reality that these days every raid brought out the yellow-leg soldiers who crossed and recrossed the Llano Estacado, hunting for the Kwahadi. And instead of the warriors who always disappeared onto the Staked Plain like breathsmoke gone in a winter gale, the Tonkawa trackers and yellow-leg soldiers preferred to attack the villages of the women and children and old ones.

Already Tall One knew that whenever the soldiers went in search of those villages, they always found what they were looking for.

36

Late September 1874

DAY AFTER ENDLESS day Company C probed deeper, rode longer, yet came up with empty hands. Tides of heat and dust and distant thunderstorms brought one day after the next washing over them, taking each day away in the same order. Summer waned and grew weary, one of the hottest any man on these plains could remember. Steamy nights swirled overhead with a million old stars flecked behind gray rain-heads, and this land once more grew old before its time. These final days of August came up clear and green-skied and hotter than the last, then imperceptibly the sun’s path grew shorter, a man unable to notice until it was too late and autumn was upon him.

Closing fast with the odor of things dying, turning, changing—never to be the same again.

Come this cooling of the nights, come this season of the yellow leaf, Jonah was told by the others. That’s what they said the Comanche called autumn.

All he knew was that soon enough another winter would be closing in, and once more he had all too little to show for the miles crossed since the first green break of spring when he had decided to ride with Lamar Lockhart’s company of poorly paid Texas Rangers.