Chapter 5

This first trip for daytime spying was more for finding a place to spy from than for anything else. I needed to find a place where I wouldn’t be spotted, but a place where I could see the whole village, for that was what I now realized that it was. I had some Army surplus binoculars, so I didn’t have to be as close as I might otherwise have needed to be.

I rejected any place on the ground for a couple of reasons. I figured that the guards would be looking for an intruder at ground level, so I needed to be perched in a tree if I could find a good one. Also, I needed to be up pretty high so that I could see the whole village. Well, I got lucky—there was a stand of trees that looked promising if I could get to them without attracting too much attention.

I’m pretty good at skulking, though I’m no match for Eddy, so I was able to get to the tree I was interested in without being spotted. That first limb was kind of far off the ground, but if I could get to it, I should be able to see all I wanted to. I also figured that no Indian was likely to think that somebody would be up a tree that was so hard to climb.

I looked around real closely, but I couldn’t see any guards looking my way, so I tried for that limb. I missed it the first time, but I made it the second try. I was able to scramble up until I was a good 30 feet off the ground. This seemed to be the last limb sturdy enough to hold my weight, so I had to settle for what I could find, but this looked pretty good. Actually, this tree would hold both Ann and me, so that made it an even better choice.

I looked around for a bit and decided to go fetch Ann. She could help me look. I needed the help because there were so many Indians in the village that it was hard to keep them straight.

Ann was surprised to see me so soon, but was delighted when I told her why I had come back for her. She stripped off the unnecessary stuff the way I had and was soon ready to come back with me. I left Eddy in charge of the camp, and I knew that he would guard the place or die in the attempt. I wasn’t worried, considering the way the Navajos felt about war dogs. Eddy was as intimidating as all get-out.

We returned to the tree, and I was gratified to see how well Ann could skulk. She was nearly as good as me, and that was plenty good enough! I lifted her to that first limb, and she was able to manage the rest on her own. I reached the limb in only one jump this time, so we were quickly in place to observe the village.

Maybe it was just a knack that women have, but Ann spotted the White kids before I did. We didn’t see any girls, but the boys were playing in the common in front of the hogans. Once she found them for me, I was able to scan the kids with the binoculars and quickly determined that neither of the boys I was looking for were in the village. Dammit, it sure would have been convenient if they had been there, but I guess that I just couldn’t win them all.

Once we had established that I had seen every one of the White boys in the village, we went back to our camp and had some lunch. We discussed the situation thoroughly, and decided to leave well enough alone. It was impossible to recover all of the White boys, and we had no criteria for choosing one over the other, so we decided to move on, and let fate take its course.

We did decide to move on that afternoon, since we were sort of tempting fate by staying so close to the Indian village. We could be discovered any time, and it was unlikely we could win a fight with that many braves. Prudence won out, and we left as soon as we could break camp. We made about 10 miles before we shut down for the night. If that wasn’t far enough, we were in more trouble than we could hope to fight our way out of.

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We finally reached New Mexico Territory. The only thing we had to complain about lately was the heat. Damn, it was hot! We weren’t so much used to the heat, as we were used to coping with the heat. We went through a hell of a lot of water, but Eddy had the best of a bad situation: he spent a lot of time walking in the shadow of one of the horses.

We had hardly crossed over into NMT when we ran into a dust up with some Comanches. They came charging at us; there must have been 20 of them. Eddy finally looked interested in something for the first time in days. We didn’t have much time to prepare, so we took off back the way we had come. There was an arroyo about a mile back, so we could make our stand there if we could get that far.

It was a close thing, the Indian horses were smaller than ours, so that ours could run faster, all things being equal, but our horses were carrying more weight, so the whole thing kind of balanced out. The wall of the arroyo was too steep to ride down, so we had to dismount and lead the horses down into the ditch. It was about eight feet deep where we were, so the horses were well protected.

We grabbed our rifles and climbed partway back up the bank so that we could get our rifles into firing position. We had both started carrying extra ammunition in a pouch slung from a shoulder strap, so, thank God, we didn’t have to take time to worry with that. We were barely in position before we had to start shooting. I had instructed Ann to shoot at the horses, especially if they were running fast, since that was a bigger target and just as fatal to the rider if the horse fell while running at speed. Besides, as a side issue, it really pissed off the Comanches.

We were able to score a few hits in our first frantic efforts to defend ourselves. Several horses fell, and the riders were thrown, never to get back on their feet. I think that, between us, we scored six hits, which I think was pretty damned good, considering how excited we were. You just don’t have time to draw a perfect sight-picture under these circumstances, so if you make a hit with every third or fourth shot, you are doing a damned good job.

That .38-40 that Ann was using was not quite the horse killer that my .44-40 was, but it would wound the beast enough so that it would stagger, and that was all that was required when the horse was running full speed. The head-on target was relatively small, not a whole lot bigger than you would get with just a man to shoot at, but the target would get bigger when we could see the horse and rider in profile. Unfortunately for us, this particular batch of Comanches was smarter than average, so they didn’t spend much time in profile. When they caught on to what was going on, they turned tail and galloped out of range.

I was able to get a count as they rode off. There were 13 Comanches still active, so we probably had not seen the last of them. However, this was the first time that I could look around, and I noticed that Eddy was nowhere to be seen. I figured that he was out stalking Indians. I was right, too, because about 10 minutes later, we heard a scream of pain. Chalk up one for Eddy.

It was still early in the afternoon, so we had plenty of daylight left to fight Indians, and vice versa. I wasn’t worried about a head-on attack from the Comanches, since they couldn’t come riding down the arroyo bank in a full charge. On the other hand, we had no way to keep them from moving out of rifle range and coming down into the arroyo too far away for us to shoot them. If they came tearing down the arroyo from either direction, they would have us at a hell of a disadvantage as they rode by. We needed some way to prevent that.

I didn’t see anything we could use to block the arroyo to either side of our position, so we were going to have to move. Right then, I wished I had enough gunpowder to blast a couple of deep holes in the arroyo bottom, but that was just a silly thought under the current circumstances.