Mart Pauley woke abruptly, with no notion of what had roused him. Amos breathed regularly beside him. Each slept rolled in his own blankets, but they shared the wagon sheet into which they folded themselves, heads and all, for shelter from the weather. The cold air stiffened the slight moisture in Mart’s nostrils as he stuck his head out. Only the lightest of winds whispered across the surface of the snow. The embers of their fire pulsed faintly in the moving air, and by these he judged the time to be after midnight.
At first he heard nothing; but as he held his breath a trick of the wind brought again the sound that must have come to him in his sleep, so faint, so far off, it might have been a whispering of frost in his own ears.
He closed his grip slowly on Amos’ arm until he waked. “Whazzamatter?”
“I swear I heard fighting,” Mart said, “a long way off.”
“Leave the best man win.” Amos settled himself to go back to sleep.
“I mean big fighting—an Indian fight…. There! …Ain’t that a bugle way off down the river?”
A few small flakes of snow touched their faces, but the night turned soundless again as soon as Amos sat up. “I don’t hear nothing.”
Neither did Mart any more. “It’s snowing again.”
“That’s all right. We’ll come up with Blue-bonnet. Snow can never hide him from us now! It’ll only pin him down for us!”
Mart lay awake for a while, listening hard; but no more sound found its way through the increasing snowfall.
Long before daylight he stewed up a frying-pan breakfast of shredded buffalo jerky, and fed the horses. “Today,” Amos said, as they settled, joint-stiff, into their icy saddles. It was the first time they had ever said that after all the many, many times they had said “Tomorrow.” Yet the word came gruffly, without exultation. The day was cold, and the snow still fell, as they pushed on through darkness toward a dull dawn.
By mid-morning they reached the Canadian, and forded its unfrozen shallows. They turned downstream, and at noon found Bluebonnet’s village—or the place it had seen its last of earth.
They came to the dead horses first. In a great bend of the river, scattered over a mile of open ground, lay nearly a hundred head of buffalo ponies, their lips drawing back from their long teeth as they froze. The snow had stopped, but not before it had sifted over the horses, and the blood, and the fresh tracks that must have been made in the first hours of the dawn. No study of sign was needed, however; what had happened here was plain. The cavalry had learned long ago that it couldn’t hold Comanche ponies.
Beyond the shoulder of a ridge they came upon the site of the village itself. A smudge, and a heavy stench of burning buffalo hair, still rose from the wreckage of twenty-two lodges. A few more dead horses were scattered here, some of them the heavier carcasses of cavalry mounts. But here, too, the snow had covered the blood, and the story of the fight, and all the strewn trash that clutters a field of battle. There were no bodies. The soldiers had withdrawn early enough so that the Comanche survivors had been able to return for their dead, and be gone, before the snow stopped.
Mart and Amos rode slowly across the scene of massacre. Nothing meaningful to their purpose was left in the burnt-out remains of the lodges. They could make out that the cavalry had ridden off down the Canadian, and that was about all.
“We don’t know yet,” Mart said.
“No,” Amos agreed. He spoke without expression, allowing himself neither discouragement nor hope. “But we know where the answer is to be found.”
It was not too far away. They came upon the bivouacked cavalry a scant eight miles below.